“Well, thanks for the advice.”
“That isn’t all, Khouri. Did it not occur to you that there might have been a very good reason for my absence until now?”
“Which is?”
“I’m dying.” The Mademoiselle let the word hover in the dust storm before continuing. “After the incident with the cache-weapon, Sun Stealer managed to inject another portion of himself into your skull—but of course, you’re aware of that. You felt him enter, didn’t you? I remember your screams. They were graphic. How odd it must have felt; how invasive.”
“Sun Stealer hasn’t exactly made an impression on me since.”
“But did it ever occur to you to ask why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, dear girl, that I’ve spent the last few weeks doing my damnedest to stop him spreading further into your head. That’s why you haven’t heard anything from me. I’ve been too preoccupied with containing him. It was bad enough dealing with the part of him that I inadvertently let return with the bloodhounds. But at least then we reached a kind of stalemate. This time, though, it’s been rather different. Sun Stealer has become stronger, while I have become successively weaker with each of his onslaughts.”
“You mean he’s still here?”
“Very much so. And the only reason you haven’t heard from him is that he’s been equally preoccupied in the war the two of us have been waging within your skull. The difference is, he’s been making progress all the time—corrupting me, co-opting my systems, exploiting my own defences against me. Oh, he’s a crafty one, take my word for it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“What’s going to happen is that I’m going to lose. I can be quite certain about this; it’s a mathematical certainty based on his current rate of gains.” The Mademoiselle smiled again, as if she were perversely proud of this analytical detachment. “I can delay his onslaught for a few days more, and then it’s all over. It might even be shorter. I’ve significantly weakened myself just by the act of presenting myself to you now. But I had no choice. I had to sacrifice time in order to reinstate your weapons privilege.”
“But when he wins…”
“I don’t know, Khouri. But be prepared for anything. He’s likely to be a rather less charming tenant than I’ve endeavoured to be. After all, you know what he did to your predecessor. Drove the poor man psychotic.” The Mademoiselle stepped back, seeming to partially cloak herself in the dust, as if she were stepping offstage via the curtains. “It’s doubtful that we’ll have the pleasure again, Khouri. I feel I should wish you well. But right now I ask only one thing of you. Do what you came here to do. And do it well.” She retreated further, her form breaking up, as if she were no more than a charcoal sketch of a woman, dispersed by wind. “You have the means now.”
The Mademoiselle was gone. Khouri waited a moment—not so much collecting her thoughts as kicking them into some vaguely cohesive mass which she hoped might stay bundled together for more than a few seconds. Then she issued the codeword which put the suit back online. The weapons, she observed with nothing remotely resembling relief, were all still functioning, just as the Mademoiselle had promised.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the suit said. “But if you’d care to reinstate full-spectrum vision you’ll observe that we have company.”
“Company?”
“I’ve just alerted the other suits. But you’re the closest.”
“Sure this isn’t Sajaki?”
“It isn’t Triumvir Sajaki, no.” It might have been Khouri’s imagination, but the suit sounded peeved that she had even doubted its judgement in this matter. “Even if it exceeds all safety limits, the Triumvir’s suit will not arrive here for another three minutes.”
“Then it must be Sylveste.”
Khouri had by then switched to the recommended sensory overlay. She could see the approaching figure—or more accurately, figures, since there were two of them, easily resolved. The other two occupied suits were converging on the location, at the same unhurried pace with which they had first departed. “Sylveste, I’m assuming you can hear us,” Volyova said. “Stop where you are. We’re zeroing in on you from three sides.”
His voice cut across the suit channel. “I assumed you’d left us here to die. Nice of you to say you were coming.”
“I’m not in the habit of breaking my word,” Volyova said. “As you undoubtedly know by now.”
Khouri began to make preparations for the kill she was still not sure she could commit herself to. She called up a target overlay, boxing Sylveste, then allocated one of her less ferocious suit-weapons: a medium-yield laser built into the head. It was puny by comparison with the other suit armaments; really just intended to warn prospective attackers to go away and pick another target. But against an unarmoured man, at virtually zero-range, it would more than suffice.
It would take only an eyeblink now, and Sylveste would die, in strict compliance with the Mademoiselle’s terms.
Sudjic was moving more rapidly now, moving more swiftly towards Volyova than Sylveste. It was then that Khouri noticed something odd about the suit Sudjic was wearing. There was something projecting from one end of her clawed arm, something small and metallic. It looked like a weapon, a light hand-held boser-pistol. She was raising her arm with unhurried calm, the way a professional would have done. For an instant Khouri experienced a shocking sense of dislocation. It was as if she were seeing herself from beyond her own body; watching herself raise a weapon in readiness to kill Sylveste.
But something was wrong.
Sudjic was pointing the weapon at Volyova.
“I take it you have a plan here—” Sylveste said.
“Ilia!” Khouri shouted. “Get down, she’s going to—”
Sudjic’s weapon was more powerful than it looked. There was a flash of horizontal light—the containment laser for the coherent matter-beam—streaking laterally across Khouri’s field of view, knifing into Volyova’s suit. Various warning alarms went haywire, signifying an excessive energy-discharge in the vicinity. Khouri’s suit automatically jumped to a higher, more hair-trigger level of battle readiness, indices on the display changing to indicate that their respective subordinated weapons systems were set to go off without her conscious say-so if her suit were similarly threatened.
Volyova’s suit was badly hit; a significant acreage of the chest was gone, revealing densely laminated hypodermal armour layers and outspilling cabling and power lines.
Sudjic took aim again, fired.
This time the blast went deeper, cutting into the wound it had already opened. Volyova’s voice cut across the channel, but it sounded weak and distant. All Khouri could make out was a kind of questioning groan; more of shock than pain.
“That was for Boris,” Sudjic said, her own voice obscenely clear. “That was for what you did to him in your experiments.” She levelled the gun again, no less calmly than if she were an artist about to put the finishing dab of paint on a masterpiece. “And this is for killing him.”
“Sudjic,” Khouri said, “stop it.”
The woman’s suit did not turn to look at her. “Why stop, Khouri? Didn’t I make it clear I had a grudge against her?”
“Sajaki’ll be here in minute or so.”
“By which time I’ll have made it look like Sylveste fired at her.” Sudjic snorted derisively. “Shit; didn’t it occur to you I’d have thought of that? I wasn’t going to let myself get stuffed just to get revenge on the old hag. She isn’t worth the expense.”
“I can’t let you kill her.”
“Can’t let me? Oh, that’s funny, Khouri. What are you going to stop me with? I don’t recall her reinstating your weapons privilege, and right now I don’t think she’s in much of a state to do it.”
Sudjic was right.
Volyova was slumped over now, her suit having lost integrity. Maybe the wound reached into her by now. If she were making any sound, her suit was too damaged to amplify it.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Khouri said. “On two counts.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t kill her, despite everything she’s done. And I do have the means.” She took a moment—-not even a fraction of second—to target the laser. “Goodbye, Sudjic. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure.”
And fired.
By the time Sajaki arrived, not much more than a minute later, what was left of Sudjic was not worth burying.
Her suit had retaliated, of course, escalating to a higher level of response, directed plasma bolts emitting from projectors which had popped up on either side of her head. But Khouri’s suit had been expecting something like that. In addition to changing the exterior state of its armour to maximally avert the plasma (retexturing itself and applying massive plasma-deflective electric currents to its own hide), it was already returning fire at a yet higher level of aggression, dispensing with childish weapons like plasma and particle-beams and opting for the more decisive deployment of ack-am pulses, releasing tiny nano-pellets from its own antilithium reservoir; each pellet caulked in a shield of ablative normal-matter, and the whole thing accelerated up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Khouri had not even had time to gasp. After issuing the initial fire-order, her suit had done all the rest on its own.
“There’s been… trouble,” she said, as the Triumvir descended and made touch-down.
“You don’t say,” he said, surveying the carnage: the wounded husk of a suit containing Volyova; the liberally strewn and now radioactive residual pieces of what had once been Sudjic, and—in the middle of it—unharmed by the blast, but seemingly too stunned to speak or try to evade capture, Sylveste and his wife.
SEVENTEEN
Rendezvous Point, Resurgam, 2566
Sylveste had rehearsed the meeting in his head many times.
He had done his best to consider every possible eventuality; even those that—based on his understanding of the situation—seemed fantastically unlikely to actually occur. But he had considered nothing like this, and with good reason. Even as it happened around him, he could not begin to make sense of what was going on; let alone why it deviated so far from the path of sanity.
“If it’s any consolation,” Sajaki said, his voice booming above the wind, amplified from the head of his monstrous suit, “I don’t understand much of this either.”
“That consoles me no end,” Sylveste said, speaking on the same radio frequency channel he had used for all his negotiations with the crew, even though their representatives—or what remained of them—were now standing within shouting distance. In the unrelenting howl of the razorstorm, shouting was not much of an option. “Call me naпve but at this point I was hoping you’d have taken things over with your usual ruthless efficiency, Sajaki. All I can say is that you appear to be slacking.”
“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
Resurgam Orbit, 2566
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 t
otal 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?”
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