‘But why not? It’s an elegant system. I can learn from it, of course, but it isn’t the same thing. What’s happening down there is methodical, endless - and there isn’t the tiniest grain of sentience behind any of it.’
She said it with genuine awe.
‘Yes, very impressive,’ Khouri said. ‘Blind replication - nothing smart about it, but because it’s happening simultaneously in a billion-odd places, they win over us by sheer weight of numbers. Isn’t that what’s going to happen? You’re going to sit here and think like hell, and it won’t make a bit of difference to the outcome. Sooner or later they’ll learn every trick you have.’
‘But not just yet.’ Volyova cocked her head towards the schematic. ‘You think I’d have been stupid enough to hit them with the most advanced countermeasures we have? You never do that in war, Khouri. You never expend any more energy - or intelligence - against an enemy than is absolutely appropriate to the situation at hand, just as you never play your best card first in a poker game. You wait, until the stakes justify it.’ And then she explained how the current countermeasures being deployed by her weapon were really very old, and not especially sophisticated. She had adapted them from ancient entries in the holographically distributed database of the warchive. ‘About three hundred years behind the current day,’ she said.
‘But Cerberus is catching up.’
‘Correct, but that rate of technical gain is actually rather stable - probably because of the thoughtless way in which our secrets are being used. There are no intuitive jumps possible, so the Amarantin systems evolve linearly. It’s like someone trying to crack a code by sheer brute-force computation. And because of that, I know rather precisely how long it will take for them to overtake our current level. At the moment they’re catching up by about a decade for every three or four hours of shiptime. Which gives us slightly less than a week before things get interesting.’
‘And this isn’t?’ Khouri shook her head, feeling - not for the first time - that there were many things she did not understand about Volyova. ‘Just how do these escalations take place? Does your weapon carry a copy of the warchive?’
‘No; too dangerous.’
‘Right; it’d be like sending a soldier behind enemy lines with every secret you’ve got. How do you do it? Transmit the secrets down to the weapon only when they’re needed? Isn’t that just as risky?’
‘That’s how it happens, but it’s much safer than you think. The transmissions are encrypted using a one-time pad; a randomly generated string of digits which specifies the change to be made to each bit in the raw signal; whether you add a zero or a one to it. After you’ve encrypted the signal with the pad, there’s no way the enemy can recover the meaning without their own copy of the pad. The weapon needs one, of course - but the copy it carries is stored deep inside, beyond tens of metres of solid diamond, with hyper-secure optical links to the assembler control systems. Only if the weapon were under major attack would there be any risk of the pad being captured - and in that case, I’d simply refrain from transmitting anything.’
Khouri finished the apple down to the seedless core. ‘So there is a way,’ she said, after thinking for a moment.
‘A way to what?’
‘To end all this. We want to do that, don’t we?’
‘You don’t think the damage has already been done?’
‘We can’t know for sure, but supposing it hasn’t? After all, what we’ve seen so far is just a layer of camouflage, and below that a layer of defences designed to protect the camouflage. It’s amazing, yes - and the mere fact that it’s an alien technology means we could probably learn from it - but we still don’t know what it’s hiding.’ She thumped her chair in emphasis, gratified to see Volyova react with a small shiver. ‘It’s something we haven’t reached yet; haven’t even glimpsed - and we won’t, until Sylveste actually goes down there.’
‘We’ll stop him from leaving.’ Volyova patted the needler which was tucked into her belt. ‘We control things now.’
‘And take the risk that he’ll kill us all by triggering the thing in his eyes?’
‘Pascale said it was a bluff.’
‘Yeah, and I’m sure she believes it.’ Khouri didn’t need to say any more; it was obvious from the slow way she nodded that Volyova understood. ‘There’s a better way,’ she continued. ‘Let Sylveste leave if he wants, but we’ll make damn sure he doesn’t have an easy time getting inside.’
‘By which you mean . . .’
‘I’ll say it, even if you won’t. We have to let it die, Volyova. We have to let Cerberus win.’
TWENTY-NINE
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
‘All we know,’ Sylveste said, ‘is that Volyova’s weapon has reached below the outer skin of the planet; perhaps into the level occupied by the machines I saw in my first exploration.’
It was fifteen hours since the bridgehead had anchored itself, during which time Volyova had done nothing, refusing to send in the first of her mechanical spies until now.
‘It seems that those machines are dedicated to maintaining the crust; keeping it repaired when it is punctured, maintaining the illusion of realism, and amassing raw material when it comes by. They’re also the first line of defence.’
‘But what lies below?’ Pascale said. ‘We didn’t get a clear look the night you were attacked, and I don’t think they’re simply resting on bedrock; that there’s a real rocky planet below this mechanised façade.’
‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Volyova said, tight-lipped.
Her spies were laughable in their simplicity; cruder even than the robots which Sylveste and Calvin had used in their initial work on the Captain. It was all part of her philosophy of not letting Cerberus see any technology more sophisticated than was absolutely necessary for the task at hand. The drones were capable of being manufactured in vast numbers by the bridgehead, a profligacy which would outweigh their general lack of intelligence. Each was the size of a fist, equipped with just enough limbs for independent locomotion; just enough eyes to justify its existence in the first place. They had no brains; not even simple networks with a few thousand neurons; not even brains which would have made the average insect seem precociously cranial. Instead, they had little spinnerettes which extruded sheathed optical fibre. The drones were operated by her weapon; all commands and everything they saw routed back and forth through that cable, with quantum privacy guaranteed.
‘I think we’ll find another layer of automation,’ Sylveste said. ‘Perhaps another layer of defences. But there has to be something worth protecting.’
‘Does there?’ asked Khouri, who had kept her vicious-looking plasma-rifle pointing at him since this meeting had convened. ‘Aren’t you guilty of a few unwarranted assumptions? You keep talking as if there’s something valuable in there we aren’t meant to get our greasy fingers all over, and that’s all that the camouflage is there for; to keep us monkeys out. But what if it’s not like that at all? What if there’s something bad in there?’
Pascale said, ‘She could be right.’
Sylveste contemplated the gun.
‘You shouldn’t patronise yourself into imagining there’s any possibility I haven’t already considered,’ he said, scarcely caring whether it was Khouri or his wife who thought they were being addressed.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Khouri said.
Ninety minutes after the first spy had unwound its cable and dropped from the opening into the sub-crustal chamber, Sylveste had his first view of what awaited him. At first, he had no idea what it was he was seeing. The giant snakelike forms - damaged and, for all he knew, dead - towered over the drones like the limbs of fallen gods, tangled and haphazard. There was no guessing at the multitude of functions which these vast machines served, although the welfare of the overlying crust seemed likely to be paramount, and it was probably within them that the molecular weapons were first stirred to activity, before being released to attack newcomers.
The crust itself was a machine of sorts, of course, but it was a machine constrained by the limitation of resembling a planet. The snakes had no such constraints.
It was less dark than he had been expecting, even though no light was straying through the wound now, which was plugged tight by the intruding weapon. Instead, the snakes themselves seemed to radiate a silvery glow, like the entrails of some phosphorescent deep-sea creature, radiant with bioluminous bacteria. It was impossible to guess at the function of this light; if there even was one. Perhaps it was an unavoidable byproduct of Amarantin nanotechnics. One could see for tens of kilometres, in any case - to the point where the ceiling of the overlying crust curved down to meet the horizon of the floor on which the snakes were coiled. Things with the gnarled, rooty shape of tree-trunks supported the roof at irregular intervals. It was like gazing into the moonlit depths of an arboreal forest; unable to glimpse the sky and barely able to glimpse the ground, so thick was the undergrowth. The roots of the trunks tangled and retangled with each other, until they formed a matrix of interlocked roots; graphite-coloured. That was the floor.
‘I wonder what we’ll find below,’ Sylveste said.
Volyova considered infanticide. There was no escaping it: by denying the bridgehead the information it needed to keep evolving counteragents to the machinery being deployed by Cerberus, she was consigning it to a slow death. Without the necessary updates from the ship, the molecular weapon templates in the bridgehead’s core could not be revised. They would remain frozen; capable only of generating spore which were more than two centuries out of date, incapable of parrying the relentless moronic march of progress exhibited by the alien defences. Her wonderful and brutal creation would be digested down to its last usable atom; spread thinly throughout the crustal matrix, where its remains would serve another function entirely, for uncountable millions of years.
Yet it had to be done.
Khouri was right: sabotaging the bridgehead was the only line of influence now remaining. They could not even destroy the weapon, since the cache was under Sun Stealer’s jurisdiction. He would prevent any attempt at that. So what remained was to kill the weapon by slow starvation of knowledge.
Crueller by far.
Although none of the others could see it, her bracelet display was pulsing with the bridgehead’s repeated requests for additional data. The weapon had noticed the omission an hour ago, when the scheduled update hadn’t arrived. The first query had been merely technical; a check to see that the communication beam was still online. Later, the weapon had become more urgent; adopting tones of polite insistence. Now it was getting far less diplomatic, throwing the machine equivalent of a tantrum.
It was not yet harmed, since the Cerberus systems had not exceeded its own retaliatory capabilities, but it was getting very agitated, even informing her of how many minutes it had left based on current escalation rates. There were not many. In rather less than two hours Cerberus would match it, and thereafter its fate would simply be a question of the sizes of the opposed forces. Cerberus would win, with absolute mathematical certainty.
Die quickly, Volyova thought.
But even as the plea ran through her mind, something impossible happened.
What little composure Volyova possessed dropped suddenly from her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Khouri. ‘You look like you’ve seen—’
‘I have,’ she said. ‘A ghost, I mean. He’s called Sun Stealer.’
‘What’s happened?’ Sylveste asked.
She looked up from the bracelet, jaw slack. ‘He’s just reinstated the transmissions to the bridgehead.’ Her gaze snapped back to her bracelet, as if hoping that whatever she had just seen there had been a mirage. But it was obvious from her expression that whatever inauspicious portent she had read was still there to be divined.
‘What was it that had to be reinstated in the first place?’ Sylveste asked. ‘I’d rather you told me.’
Khouri tightened her grip on the warm leather-cladding of the plasma-rifle. She had been uncomfortable with the situation before, but now she was riding a knife-edge of constant terror.
‘The weapon lacks the protocols for recognising its own obsolescence, ’ she said, and then seemed to shiver, as if shaking off possession. ‘No . . . what I mean is . . . there are things the weapon can’t be allowed to know, except when it needs to know them—’ She paused, glancing anxiously around at her crewmates, unsure that she was making any sense. ‘It can’t be allowed to know how to evolve its own defences before the moment when that evolution has to be expedited; the timing of the upgrades is crucial—’
‘You were trying to starve it,’ Sylveste said. Hegazi, next to him, said nothing, but acknowledged his remark with a barely perceptible nod, like a despot casting judgement.
‘No, I . . .’
‘Don’t apologise,’ he said, with great insistence. ‘If I wanted what you want - to sabotage this whole operation - I’m sure I’d have done something similar. Your timing was impeccable, as well - you waited until you’d had the satisfaction of seeing it work; the satisfaction of knowing that your toy functioned.’
‘You prick,’ Khouri said, spitting in the process. ‘You narrow-minded, egotistical prick.’
‘Congratulations,’ Sylveste said. ‘Now you can progress to words with six syllables. But in the meantime would you mind pointing that unpleasant piece of hardware somewhere other than my face?’
‘With pleasure,’ she said, not allowing the rifle to waver. ‘I’ve got just the anatomical region in mind.’
Hegazi turned to the other member of the Triumvirate present. ‘Would you mind explaining what’s going on?’
‘Sun Stealer must have control of the ship’s communications systems,’ Volyova said. ‘That’s the only possibility; the only way my command to stop the transmissions could have been rescinded. ’
But even as she was speaking she was shaking her head.
‘Which isn’t possible. We know he’s confined to the gunnery, and there’s no physical link between the gunnery and comms.’
‘There must be now,’ Khouri said.
‘But if there is . . .’ The whites of her eyes were showing now; bright crescents against the gloom of the bridge. ‘There are no logical barriers between comms and the rest of the ship. If Sun Stealer really has got that far, there isn’t anything he can’t touch.’
It was a long time before anyone spoke; as if everyone - even Sylveste - needed time to adjust to the gravity of the situation. Khouri tried to read him, but there was no way to tell how much of this he accepted, even now. She still suspected that he viewed everything as a paranoiac fantasy that she had woven from her own subconscious; one that had somehow infected both Volyova and, latterly, Pascale.
Perhaps a part of him was still refusing to believe, despite all the evidence.
What evidence, though? Apart from the reinstated signal - and all that it implied - there was nothing to suggest that Sun Stealer had reached beyond the gunnery. But if he had . . .
‘You,’ Volyova said, breaking the silence. She was pointing her gun at Hegazi. ‘You, svinoi. You had to have a part in this, didn’t you? Sajaki’s out of the frame, and Sylveste doesn’t have the expertise - so it had to be you.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’
‘Helping Sun Stealer. You did it, didn’t you?’
‘Get a grip, Triumvir.’
Khouri wondered in which direction she should be pointing the plasma-rifle. Sylveste looked as shaken as Hegazi; as surprised at Volyova’s sudden line of enquiry.
‘Listen,’ Khouri said. ‘Just because he’s had his tongue up Sajaki’s arse ever since I came aboard, it doesn’t mean he’d do anything that stupid.’
‘Thanks,’ Hegazi said. ‘I think.’
‘You’re not off the hook,’ Volyova said. ‘Not by a long mark. Khouri’s right; doing what you did would have been an act of gross stupidity. But that hardly disqualifies you from having done
it. You had enough expertise to do it. And you’re chimeric as well - maybe Sun Stealer’s in you too. In which case I’m afraid it’s just too dangerous to have you around.’
She nodded at Khouri. ‘Khouri; take him down to one of the airlocks.’
‘You’re going to kill me,’ Hegazi said, as she prodded him along the flooded corridor with the barrel of the plasma-rifle, watching janitor-rats scatter ahead of them. ‘That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? You’re going to space me.’
‘She just wants you somewhere where you can’t do any harm,’ Khouri said, not especially in the mood for a protracted conversation with her prisoner.
‘Whatever it was she thinks, I didn’t do it. Sorry to admit it, but I haven’t got the expertise. Does that satisfy you?’
Now he was annoying her, but she sensed that he would only shut up if she talked back to him.
‘I’m not sure you did do it,’ she said. ‘After all, you’d have had to make the arrangements before you had any idea that Volyova was going to sabotage her weapon. You can’t have done it since; you’ve been on the bridge the whole time.’
They had reached the nearest airlock. It was a small unit, just large enough to take a suited human. Like virtually everything else in this part of the ship, the controls on the door were caked in grime and corrosion and odd fungal growth. Yet it still functioned, miraculously.
‘So why are you doing this?’ Hegazi asked, as the door hummed open and she poked him into the cramped, sullenly lit interior. ‘If you don’t think I was capable of doing it?’
‘It’s because I don’t like you,’ she said, and closed the door on him.
THIRTY
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
When they were at last alone in their quarters, Pascale said, ‘You can’t go through with this, Dan. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 56