‘I was recruited,’ she said. ‘I didn’t understand what they were. They want Sylveste. They’re not lying. I’ve seen the weapons they’ve got in this ship, and I think they will use them.’
Volyova affected a look of bored indifference, as if all of this were exactly what she would have expected; tiresomely so.
‘I’m sorry none of you have brought Sylveste forward. I think Volyova’s serious when she says she’s going to punish you for that. All I want to say is, you’d better believe her. And maybe if some of you can bring him forward now it won’t be too—’
‘Enough.’
Volyova took back the bracelet. ‘I’m extending my deadline by one hour only.’
But the hour passed. Volyova barked cryptic commands into her bracelet, causing a target-designator to spring into place over the northerly latitudes of Resurgam. The red cross-hairs hunted with sullen, sharklike calm, until they latched onto a particular spot near the planet’s northern icecap. Then they pulsed a bloodier red, and status graphics informed Volyova that the ship’s orbital-suppression elements - almost the puniest weapons system it could deploy - were now activated, armed, targeted and ready.
Then she resumed her address to the colonists.
‘People of Resurgam,’ Volyova said. ‘Our weapons have just aligned themselves on the small settlement of Phoenix; fifty-four degrees north by twenty west of Cuvier. In fractionally less than thirty seconds Phoenix and its immediate environs will cease to exist.’
The woman dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing. ‘This will be our last announcement for twenty-four hours. You have until then to produce Sylveste, or we escalate to a larger target. Count yourselves lucky that we began with one as small as Phoenix.’
The general tenor of her pronouncements, Khouri realised, had been that of a schoolteacher patiently explaining why the punishment she was about to visit upon her pupils was both in their best interests and entirely brought about by their own actions. She avoided saying, ‘This will hurt me more than it hurts you,’ but if she had, Khouri would not have been at all surprised. In fact, she wondered if there was anything Volyova could now do which would surprise her in any way. It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species. And not just Volyova, but the entire crew. Khouri felt a pang of revulsion, shuddering to think how much a part of them she had recently dared imagine herself to be. It was as if they had all pulled masks from their faces, revealing snakes.
Volyova fired.
For a moment - a long, pregnant moment - there was nothing. Khouri began to entertain the idea that maybe the entire thing had been a bluff after all. But that hope lasted until the walls of the bridge shuddered, as if the entire ship were an ancient sea vessel scraping past an iceberg. Khouri felt none of the motion, since the articulated seat boom moved to smother the vibrations. But she had no doubts that she had seen it, and seconds later she heard what sounded like distant thunder.
The hull weapons had discharged.
On the projected image of Resurgam, the weapons readouts recast themselves, changing to illuminate the conditions of the armaments in the moments after they had been deployed. Hegazi consulted his seat readouts, his eyepiece clicking and whirring as it assimilated the news.
‘Suppression elements discharged,’ he said, voice clipped and devoid of emphasis. ‘Targeting systems confirm correct acquisition. ’ Then, with magisterial slowness, he elevated his gaze to the globe.
Khouri looked with him.
There was - where previously there had been nothing - a tiny red-hot smear near the edge of Resurgam’s northern polar cap, like a foul rat’s eye in the crust of the world. It was darkening now, like a hot needle just pulled from a brazier. But it was still hurtingly bright, darkening less through its own cooling than because it was being progressively shrouded by titanic veils of uplifted planetary debris. In windows which opened fleetingly in the curdling dark storm, Khouri observed dancing tendrils of lightning, their bright ignitions strobing the landscape for hundreds of kilometres around. A near-circular shockwave was racing from the site of the attack. Khouri observed its movement via a subtle change in the refractive index of the air, the way a ripple in shallow water caused the rocks below to acquire a momentary fluidity of their own.
‘Preliminary sit-rep coming in now,’ Hegazi said, still managing to sound like a bored acolyte reciting the dullest of scriptures. ‘Weps functionality: nominal. Ninety-nine point four per cent probability that target was completely neutralised. Seventy-nine per cent probability that no one within two hundred kilometres could have survived, unless they were behind a kilometre of armour.’
‘Good enough odds for me,’ Volyova said. She studied the wound in the surface of Resurgam for a moment longer, evidently satiating herself with the thought of planetary-scale destruction.
FIFTEEN
Mantell, North Nekhebet, 2566
‘They bluffed,’ Sluka said, just as a sudden, false dawn shone over the north-easterly horizon, turning the intervening ridges and bluffs into serrated black cutouts. The glare was magnesium-bright, edged in purple. Briefly it overloaded whole strips of Sylveste’s vision, leaving numb voids where it had burned.
‘Care to take another guess?’ he asked.
For a moment Sluka seemed unable to answer. She only stared at the flare, mesmerised by its radiance and the message of atrocity it brought.
‘He told you they’d do it,’ Pascale said. ‘You should have listened to him. He knew these people. He knew they’d do exactly what they promised.’
‘I never thought they would,’ Sluka said, her voice so quiet that it seemed she was talking to herself. Despite the glare, it was still a totally silent evening, free even of the usual music of Resurgam’s winds. ‘I thought their threat was too monstrous to take seriously.’
‘Nothing’s too monstrous for them.’ Sylveste’s eyes were returning to normality now; enough that he could read the expressions of the women who were standing next to him on Mantell’s mesa. ‘From now on, you’d better take Volyova at her word. She means what she said. In twenty-four hours she’ll do it all again, unless you turn me over.’
It was as if Sluka had not heard him. ‘Perhaps we ought to get down,’ was all she said.
Sylveste agreed, though before they headed back into the mesa they took time to crudely measure the direction from which the flash had come. ‘We know when it happened,’ Sylveste said. ‘And we know the direction. When the pressure wave comes through, we’ll know how far away it was. Settlements on Resurgam are still widely spread, so we should be able to pinpoint it.’
‘She said the name of the place,’ Pascale said.
Sylveste nodded.
‘But while I’d believe any threat she made, I also know Volyova’s not to be trusted.’
‘I don’t know anything about Phoenix,’ Sluka said, as they descended via a cargo elevator. ‘I thought I knew most of the recent settlements. But then again I’ve not exactly been at the heart of government these last few years.’
‘She would have started with something small,’ Sylveste said. ‘Otherwise she wouldn’t have room to escalate. We can assume Phoenix was a soft target; a scientific or geological outpost; something on which the rest of the colony wasn’t materially dependent. Just people, in other words.’
Sluka shook her head. ‘We’re talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It’s like their only reason for existing was so they could die.’
Sylveste felt physically sick; on the nauseous cusp of actually vomiting. It was, he thought, the only occasion in his life when this feeling had been engendered by an external event; something in which he was not directly participating. He had not even felt this way when Carine Lefevre had died. The mistake - the error - had not been his to commit. And while he had argued with Sluka that the crew would inflict what they threatened, some part of him had clung to the idea that, ultimat
ely, they would not; that he was wrong and Sluka and the other humanitarians were correct. Perhaps, had he been in Sluka’s position, he too would have ignored the warning, irrespective of how sure he had felt before the attack. The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.
The pressure wave came three hours later. By then it was little more than a gust, but it was a gust completely out of place on such a still night. After it had passed, the air was turbulent, prone to sudden squalls, as if a full-blooded razorstorm was on the verge. Timing of the shock indicated that the site of the attack was somewhat less than three and a half thousand miles away (seismic data also confirmed this); almost due north-east, according to the visual evidence. Retiring under guard to Sluka’s stateroom, they pushed themselves beyond sleep with strong coffee, calling up global maps of the colony from Mantell’s archives.
Feeling edgy, Sylveste sipped his drink.
‘Like you say, it could be a new settlement they’ve hit. Are these maps up to date?’
‘As good as,’ Sluka said. ‘They were refreshed from Cuvier’s central cartographics section about a year ago, before things became too serious around here.’
Sylveste looked at the map, projected over Sluka’s table like a ghostly, topographic tablecloth. The area displayed by the map was two thousand kilometres square, large enough to contain the destroyed colony, even if their directional estimate was crude.
But there was no sign of Phoenix.
‘We need more recent maps,’ he said. ‘It’s possible this place was founded in the last year.’
‘That’s not going to be easy to arrange.’
‘Then you’d better find a way. You have to make a decision in the next twenty-four hours. Probably the biggest of your life.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve as good as decided to let them have you.’
Sylveste shrugged, as if it were of no consequence to him. ‘Even so, you should still be in possession of the facts. You’re going to be dealing with Volyova. If you can’t be sure that her threats are genuine, you might be tempted to call her bluff.’
She looked at him, long and hard.
‘We do still have - in principle - data links to Cuvier, via what remains of the comsat girdle. But they’ve barely been used since the domes were blown. It would be risky to open them - the data-trail could lead back to us.’
‘I’d say that’s the least of anyone’s worries right now.’
‘He’s right,’ Pascale said. ‘With all this going on, who’s going to care about a minor breach of security in Cuvier? I’d say it would be worthwhile just to get the maps updated.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘An hour; two hours. Why, were you planning on going somewhere?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said, conspicuously failing to smile. ‘But someone else might be deciding for me.’
They went surfaceside again while they were waiting for the maps to be revised. There were no stars visible in the low north-east; just a hump of sooty nothingness, as if a gargantuan crouched figure were looming over the horizon. It must have been an uplifted wall of dust, edging towards them. ‘It’ll blanket the world for months,’ Sluka said. ‘Just as if a massive volcano had gone off.’
‘The winds are getting stronger,’ Sylveste said.
Pascale nodded. ‘Could they have done that - changed the weather, this far from the attack? What if the weapon they used caused radioactive contamination?’
‘It needn’t have been,’ Sylveste said. ‘Some kind of kinetic-energy weapon would have sufficed. Knowing Volyova, she wouldn’t have done anything more than was absolutely necessary. But you’re right to worry about radiation. That weapon probably opened a hole right through the lithosphere. It’s anyone’s guess what was released from the crust.’
‘We shouldn’t spend too much time surfaceside.’
‘Agreed - but that probably goes for the colony as a whole.’
One of Sluka’s aides appeared in the exit door.
‘You’ve got the maps?’ she asked.
‘Give us another half-hour,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the data, but the encryption’s pretty heavy. There’s news from Cuvier, though. We just picked it up, publicly broadcast.’
‘Go on.’
‘It seems the ship took pictures of the - uh - aftermath. They transmitted them to the capital, and now they’ve been sent around the planet.’ The aide took a battered compad from his pocket, its flatscreen throwing his features into lilac relief. ‘I have the images.’
‘You’d better show us.’
The aide placed the compad on the mesa’s gritty, wind-smoothed surface. ‘They must have used infrared,’ he said.
The pictures were awesome and terrifying. Molten rock was still snaking from the crater and beyond, or spraying in fountainlike cascades from dozens of suddenly birthed baby volcanoes. All evidence of the settlement had been obliterated, completely swallowed by the wide cauldron of the crater, which must have been a kilometre or two across. There were vast patches of glassy smoothness near its centre, like solidified tar; black as night.
‘For a moment I hoped we were wrong,’ Sluka said. ‘I hoped that the flash, even the pressure-wave - I hoped that somehow they’d been faked, like a theatrical effect. But I can’t see how they could have faked this without actually blowing a hole in the planet.’
‘We’ll know in a while,’ the aide said. ‘I presume I can speak freely?’
‘This concerns Sylveste,’ Sluka said. ‘So he may as well hear it.’
‘Cuvier has a plane heading towards the site of the attack. They’ll be able to confirm that this imagery wasn’t fabricated.’
By the time they returned underground the maps had been cracked, replacing the outdated copies in Mantell’s archive. Once again they retired to Sluka’s stateroom to view the data. This time the map’s accompanying information showed that it had been updated only a few weeks earlier.
‘They’ve done pretty well,’ Sylveste said. ‘To have kept up with the business of cartography while the city was crumbling around them. I admire their dedication.’
‘Never mind their motives,’ Sluka said, brushing her fingers against one of the pedestal-mounted globes which flanked the room, seemingly to anchor herself to the planet which now seemed to be spinning irrevocably beyond her control. ‘As long as Phoenix - or whatever they called it - is there, that’s all I care.’
‘It’s there all right,’ Pascale said.
Her finger penetrated the projected terrain, arrowing a tiny, labelled dot in the otherwise unpopulated north-eastern ranges. ‘It’s the only thing so far north,’ she said. ‘And the only settlement in remotely the right direction. It’s called Phoenix, too.’
‘What else do you have on it?’
Sluka’s aide - he was a small man with a delicately oiled moustache and goatee - spoke softly into his sleeve-mounted compad, instructing the map to zoom in on the settlement. A series of demographic icons popped into existence above the table. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Just a few multi-family surface shacks linked by tubes. A few underground workings. No ground connections, although they did have a landing pad for aircraft.’
‘Population?’
‘I don’t think population’s quite the word for it,’ the man said. ‘Just a hundred or so; about eighteen family units. Most of them from Cuvier, by the look of this.’ He shrugged. ‘Actually, if this was her idea of a strike against the colony, I think we did remarkably well. A hundred or so people - well, it’s a tragedy. But I’m surprised she didn’t play her hand against a more populous target. The fact that none of us really knew this place existed - it almost nullifies the act, don’t you think?’
‘A splendidly inept thing,’ Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.
‘What?’
‘The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And
it doesn’t just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feels a damn about these people.’ Sylveste looked at the map, wondering what it must have been like for the inhabitants, given those few seconds of warning which Volyova had prescribed them. He wondered if any of them had taken the trouble to leave their dwellings and face the sky, in order to quicken - fractionally - the coming annihilation. ‘But I do know one thing. We have all the evidence we need that she’s a woman of her word. And that means you have to let me go to them.’
‘I’m reluctant to lose you,’ Sluka said. ‘But it isn’t like I have much choice in the matter. You’ll be wanting to contact them, of course.’
‘Naturally,’ Sylveste said. ‘And of course Pascale will be coming with me. But there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me first.’
‘A favour?’ Sluka sounded amused, as if this were the last thing in the world she would have expected from him. ‘Well, what can I do for you, now that we’ve become such firm friends?’
Sylveste smiled. ‘Actually it’s not so much what you can do for me as what Doctor Falkender can. It concerns my eyes, you see.’
From the vantage point of her floating, boom-suspended seat, the Triumvir observed the handiwork she had wrought on the planet below. It was all perfectly clear, imaged precisely on the bridge’s projection sphere. In the last ten hours she had observed the wound extend dark cyclonic tendrils away from its focus, evidence that the weather in that region - and, by implication, elsewhere on the planet - had been tipped towards a violent new equilibrium. According to the locally culled data, the colonists on Resurgam called such phenomena razorstorms, on account of the merciless flensing quality of the airborne dust. It was fascinating to watch, much like the dissection of some unfamiliar animal species. Although she had had more experience with planets than many of her crewmates, there were still things about them which she found surprising and not a little disturbing. It was disturbing that simply puncturing a hole in the planet’s integument could have this much effect - not just on the immediate locality of the place she had attacked, but thousands of kilometres beyond. Eventually, she knew, there would not be a spot on the planet which had not been in some measurable way affected by her action. The dust she had caused to be elevated would eventually settle; a fine blackened, faintly radioactive caul deposited fairly uniformly around the planet. In the temperate regions it would soon be washed away by the weather processes which the colonists had instigated, assuming of course that those processes still functioned. But in the arctic regions there was never any rain, so the fine fall of dust would remain unperturbed for centuries to come. Eventually other deposits would cover it, and it would become part of the irrevocable geological memory of the planet. Perhaps, the Triumvir mused, in a few million years other beings would arrive on Resurgam, sharing something of humanity’s curiosity. They would want to learn of the planet’s history, and in doing so they would take core samples, reaching far back into Resurgam’s past. Doubtless that deposited layer of dust would not be the only mystery they had to solve, but nonetheless they would mull on it, if only fleetingly. And she had no doubt that those hypothetical future investigators would come to a totally wrong conclusion regarding the layer’s origin. It would never occur to them that it had been put there by an act of conscious volition . . .
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