The message ended, then recommenced from the beginning, with Volyova’s blunt introduction. Sylveste listened to it in its entirety twice more before anyone dared interrupt his concentration.
‘They wouldn’t do it,’ Sluka said. ‘Surely not.’
‘It’s barbaric,’ Pascale added, eliciting a nod from their captor. ‘No matter how much they need you — they couldn’t possibly intend to do what she said. I mean, destroy a whole settlement?’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said. ‘They’ve done it before. And I don’t doubt that they’ll do it again.’
There had been never been any real certainty in Volyova’s mind that Sylveste was alive — but on the other hand, the fact that he might not be present was something she had carefully avoided dwelling on, because the consequences of failure were too unpleasant to bring to mind. It mattered not that this was Sajaki’s quest, rather than her own. If it failed, he would punish her just as severely as if she had contrived the whole thing herself; as if it were Volyova who had brought them to this dispiriting place.
She had not really expected anything to happen in the first few hours. That was too optimistic; it presumed that Sylveste’s captors were awake and immediately aware of her warning. Realistically, it might be a fraction of a day before the news was passed along the chain of command to the right people; yet more time while it was verified. But as the hours became tens of hours, and then most of a day, she was forced to the conclusion that her threat would have to be enacted.
Of course, the colonists had not been entirely silent. Ten hours earlier, one unnamed group had come forward with what they claimed were Sylveste’s remains. They had left them on the top of a mesa, then retreated into caves through which the ship’s sensors could not peer. Volyova sent down a drone to examine the remains, but while they were a close genetic match, they did not agree precisely with the tissue samples retained since Sylveste’s last visit to the ship. It would have been tempting to punish the colonists for this, but on reflection she decided against such a course of action: they had acted solely out of fear, with no prospect of personal gain except their own — and everyone else’s — survival, and she did not want to deter any other parties coming forward. Likewise she had stilled her hand when two independently acting individuals announced themselves as Sylveste, since it was obvious that the people in question were not really lying, but genuinely believed themselves to be the man himself.
Now, however, there was not even time left for deception.
‘I’m actually rather surprised,’ she said. ‘I thought by now they would have given him over. But evidently one party in this arrangement is seriously underestimating the other.’
‘You can’t back down now,’ Hegazi said.
‘Of course not.’ Volyova said it with surprise, as if the thought of clemency had never once occurred to her.
‘No; you have to,’ Khouri said. ‘You can’t go through with this.’
This was almost the first thing she had said all day. Perhaps she was having trouble coming to terms with the monster for whom she now worked: this suddenly tyrannical incarnation of the previously fair Volyova. It was difficult not to sympathise. When she examined herself, what she saw was indeed something monstrous, even if it was not entirely the truth.
‘Once a threat’s made,’ Volyova said, ‘it’s in everyone’s interests to carry it through if the terms aren’t met.’
‘What if they can’t keep the terms?’ Khouri said.
Volyova shrugged. ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’
She opened the link to Resurgam and said her piece — reiterating the demands she had made, and stating her deep disappointment that Sylveste had not been brought to light. She was wondering how convincing she sounded — whether the colonists truly believed her threats — when she was struck by an inspirational idea. She unclipped her bracelet, whispering the command which would instruct it to accept limited input from a third party, rather than injuring them.
She passed the bracelet to Khouri.
‘You want to salve your conscience, be my guest.’
Khouri examined the device as if it might suddenly extrude fangs, or spit venom into her face. Finally she raised it to her mouth, not actually slipping it around her wrist.
‘Go ahead,’ Volyova said. ‘I’m serious. Say whatever you want — assure you it won’t do a blind bit of good.’
‘Speak to the colonists?’
‘Certainly — if you think you can convince them better than I can.’
For a moment Khouri said nothing. Then — diffidently — she started speaking into the bracelet. ‘My name is Khouri,’ she said. ‘For whatever it’s worth, I want you to know I’m not with these people. I don’t agree with what they’re doing.’ Khouri’s large and frightened eyes scanned the bridge, as if she expected any moment to be punished for this. But the others showed only mild interest in what she had to say.
‘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 t
he 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, ultimately, 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 hu
mp 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.’
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