‘What did happen, by the way?’ Thorn added.
I don’t know. Not all of it anyway. We provoked a response, and I’m pretty sure we were about to die, or at least to be swallowed up by that machinery.‘
‘I know. I had that feeling as well.’
They looked at each other, conscious that the period of union in the Inhibitor data-gathering network had permitted them a level of intimacy neither had expected. They had shared very little other than fear, but Thorn at least had been shown that her fear was every bit as intense as his own, and that the Inhibitor attack had not been something she had arranged for his benefit. But there had been something more than fear, hadn’t there? There had been concern for each other’s welfare. And when the third mind had arrived, there had also been something very close to remorse.
‘Thorn… did you feel the other mind?’ Khouri asked.
I felt something. Something other than you, and something other than the machinery.‘
I know who it was,‘ she said, knowing that it was far too late for lies and evasion now, and that Thorn needed to be told as much of the truth as she understood. ’At least, I think I recognised him. The mind was Sylveste’s.‘
‘Dan Sylveste?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I knew him, Thorn. Not well, and not for long, but enough to recognise him again. And I know what happened to him.’
‘Start at the beginning, Ana.’
She rubbed the grit from the edge of her eye, hoping that the machinery was truly inert and not simply sleeping. Thorn was right. Her admission had been the first crack in an otherwise perfect facade. But the crack could not be unmade. It would spread, extending fracturing fingers. All she could offer now was damage limitation.
‘Everything you think you know about the Triumvir is wrong. She isn’t the maniacal tyrant that the populace thinks. The government built up her image. It needed a demon, a hate figure. If the people hadn’t had the Triumvir to hate, they would have directed their anger, their sense of frustration, at the government itself. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.’
‘She murdered a whole settlement.’
‘No…’ She was suddenly weary. ‘No. It didn’t happen like that. She just made it seem that way, don’t you understand? Nobody actually died.’
‘And you can be sure of that, can you?’
‘I was there.’
The hull creaked and reconfigured itself again. Shortly they would be outside the electromagnetic influence of the gas giant. The Inhibitor processes continued unabated: the slow laying of the sub-atmospheric tubes, the building of the great orbital arc. What had just happened within Roc had made no difference to that grander scheme.
‘Tell me about it, Ana. Is that really your name, or is it another layer of untruth that I need to peel back?’
‘It is my name,’ she said. ‘But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. We came to find Sylveste.’
Thorn folded his arms. ‘Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere.’
‘The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus/Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.’
‘And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?’
‘There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.’
‘A mutiny?’
Khouri bit her lip and nodded. ‘Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.’
‘Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?’
Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.
‘I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.’
He touched a finger to his lip. ‘Try me.’
‘Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.’
‘You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.’
He shrugged. ‘Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?’
‘Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.’ She raised a finger, anticipating his point. I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I — this me — didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.‘
‘But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn — subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.’
‘He’d take an interest in us?’
‘He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.’
‘So what was that thing?’
‘An envoy, I suppose. A chunk of Hades, sent out to gather information. And Sylveste sent a copy of himself along with it. The envoy learned what it could, buzzed around the machinery, shadowed us, and then headed back to Hades. Presumably when it gets there it’ll merge back into the matrix. Maybe it was never totally disconnected — there could have been a filament of nuclear matter a single quark wide stretching all the way from the marble back to the edge of the system, and we’d never have known it.’
‘Go back a bit. What happened after you left Hades? Did Ilia come with you?’
‘No. She was never mapped into the matrix. But she survived and we met up again in orbit around Hades, inside Nostalgia for Infinity. The logical thing to have done would have been to get away from this system, a long way away, but it wasn’t happening. The ship was, well, not exactly damaged, but changed. It had suffered a kind of psychotic episode. It didn’t want to have any further dealings with the external universe. It was all we could do to get it back to the inner system, within an AU of Resurgam.’
‘Hm.’ Thorn had his chin pr
opped on his knuckle. ‘This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense.’
‘It does make sense, you’ll see.’
She told him the rest of it, Thorn listening quietly and patiently, nodding occasionally and asking her to clarify certain aspects of her story. She told him that everything they had already told him about the Inhibitors was the truth in so far as they knew it, and that the threat was as real as they had claimed.
‘That much I think you’ve convinced me of,’ Thorn said.
‘Sylveste brought them down, unless they were already on their way here. That’s why he might still feel some obligation to protect us, or at least take a passing interest in the external universe. The thing around Hades was a kind of trigger, we think. Sylveste knew there was risk in what he did, but he didn’t care.’ Khouri scowled, feeling a surge of anger. ‘Fucking arrogant scientist. I was supposed to kill him, you know. That’s why I was on that ship in the first place.’
‘Another delicious complication.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘Who sent you?’
‘A woman from Chasm City. Called herself the Mademoiselle. She and Sylveste went years back. She knew what he was up to, and that he had to be stopped. That was my job. Trouble was, I fucked up.’
‘You don’t look like the sort to commit cold-blooded murder.’
‘You don’t know me, Thorn. Not at all.’
‘Not yet, perhaps.’ He looked at her long and hard until, with some reluctance, she turned away from his gaze. He was a man she felt attracted to and she knew that he was a man who believed in something. He was strong and brave — she had seen that for herself, in Inquisition House. And it was true, even if she did not necessarily want to admit it, that she had engineered this situation with some inkling of how it might play out, from the moment she had insisted that they bring Thorn aboard. But there was no escaping the single painful truth that continued to define her life, even after so much had happened. She was a married woman.
Thorn added, ‘But there’s always time, as they say.’
‘Thorn
‘Keep talking, Ana. Keep talking.’ Thorn’s voice was very soft. ‘I want to hear it all.’
Later, when they had put a light-minute between themselves and the gas giant, the console signalled an incoming tight-beam transmission relayed from Nostalgia for Infinity. Ilia must have tracked Khouri’s ship with deep-look sensors, waiting until there was sufficient angular separation between it and the Inhibitor machines. Even with the relay drones she was deeply anxious not to compromise her position.
‘I see you are on your way home,’ she said, intense displeasure etched into every word. ‘I see also that you went much closer to the heart of their activity than we agreed. That is not good. Not good at all.’
‘She doesn’t sound happy,’ Thorn whispered.
‘What you did was exceptionally dangerous. I just hope you learned something for your efforts. I demand that you make all haste back to the starship. We mustn’t detain Thorn from his urgent work on Resurgam… nor the Inquisitor from her duties in Cuvier. I will have more to say on this matter when you return.’ She paused before adding, ‘Irina out.’
‘She still doesn’t know that I know,’ Thorn said.
‘I’d better tell her.’
‘That doesn’t sound terribly wise to me, Ana.’
She looked at him. ‘No?’
‘Not just yet. We don’t know how she’d take it. Probably better that we act as if I still think… et cetera.’ He made a spiralling gesture with his forefinger. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘I kept something from Ilia once before. It was a serious mistake.’
‘This time you’ll have me on your side. We can break it to her gently once we’re safe and sound aboard the ship.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Thorn narrowed his eyes playfully. ‘It will work out in the end, I promise you that. All you have to do is trust me. That isn’t so hard, is it? After all, it’s no more than you asked of me.’
‘The trouble was we were lying.’
He touched her arm, a contact that might have seemed accidental had he not prolonged it for several artful seconds. ‘We’ll just have to put that behind us, won’t we?’
She reached over and delicately removed his hand, which closed gently around her own, and for a moment they were frozen like that. Khouri was conscious of her own breathing. She looked at Thorn, knowing full well what she wanted and knowing that he wanted it too.
‘I can’t do this, Thorn.’
‘Why not?’ He spoke as if there were no valid objection she could possibly raise.
‘Because…’ She slipped her hand from his. ‘Because of what I still am. Because of a promise I made to someone.’
‘Who?’ Thorn asked.
‘My husband.’
‘I’m sorry. I never thought for a moment that you might be married.’ He sat back in his seat, putting a sudden distance between them. ‘I don’t mean that in an insulting way. It’s just one minute you’re the Inquisitor, the next you’re an Ultra. Neither exactly fitted my preconceptions of a married woman.’
She raised a hand. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Who is he, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘It isn’t that simple, Thorn. I honestly wish it was.’
‘Tell me. Please. I do want to know.’ He paused, perhaps reading something in her expression. ‘Is your husband dead, Ana?’
‘It isn’t that simple, either. My husband was a soldier. I used to be one as well. We were both soldiers on Sky’s Edge, in the Peninsula wars. I’m sure you’ve heard of our quaint little civil dispute.’ She did not wait for his answer. ‘We were fighting together. We were wounded and shipped into orbit unconscious. But something went wrong. I was misidentified, mis-tagged, put on the wrong hospital ship. I still don’t know all the details. I ended up being loaded aboard a bigger ship heading out-system. A lighthugger. By the time the error was discovered I was around Epsilon Eridani, Yellowstone.’
‘And your husband?’
‘I still don’t know. At the time I was led to think that he’d been left behind around Sky’s Edge. Thirty, forty years, Thorn — that’s how long he’d have had to wait, even if I’d managed to get on a ship making the immediate return trip.’
‘What kind of longevity therapies did you have on Sky’s Edge?’
‘None at all.’
‘So there would have been a good chance of your husband being dead by the time you got back?’
‘He was a soldier. Life expectancy in a freeze/thaw battalion was already pretty damned short. And anyway, there wasn’t any ship headed straight back.’ She rubbed her eyes and sighed. ‘That was what I was told had happened to him. But I still don’t know for sure. He might have come with me on the same ship; everything else might have been a lie.’
Thorn nodded. ‘So your husband might still be alive, but in the Yellowstone system?’
‘Yes — supposing he ever got there, and supposing he didn’t ship back on the next outbound ship. But even then he’d be old. I spent a long time frozen in Chasm City before I came here. And I’ve spent even more time frozen since then, while Ilia and I waited for the wolves.’
Thorn was silent for a minute. ‘So you’re married to a man you still love, but who you probably won’t ever see again?’
‘Now you understand why it isn’t easy for me,’ she said.
‘I do,’ Thorn said quietly, with something close to reverence in his voice. ‘1 do, and I’m sorry.’ Then he touched her hand again. ‘But maybe it’s still time to let go of the past, Ana. We all have to one day.’
It took much less time to reach Yellowstone than Clavain had expected. He wondered if Zebra had drugged him, or whether the thin cold air in the cabin had caused him to slip into unconsciousness… but there appeared to be no gap in the sequence of his thoughts. The time
had simply passed very rapidly. Three or four times Manoukhian and Zebra had spoken quietly and urgently between themselves, and shortly thereafter Clavain had felt the ship change its vector, presumably to avoid another tangle with the Convention. But there had never been any tangible sense of panic.
He had the impression that Zebra and Manoukhian regarded another conflict as something to be avoided out of a sense of decorum or neatness, rather than a pragmatic matter of survival. Whatever else they were, they were professionals.
The ship looped above the Rust Belt, avoiding it by many thousands of kilometres, and then made a spiralling approach towards Yellowstone’s cloud layers. The planet swelled, filling every window within Clavain’s field of view. A skin of neon-pink ionisation gases surrounded the ship as she cleaved into atmosphere. Clavain felt his gravity return after hours of weightlessness. It was, he reminded himself, the first actual gravity that he had felt in years.
‘Have you visited Chasm City before, Mr Clavain?’ Zebra asked him, when the black ship had completed its atmospheric insertion.
‘Once or twice,’ he said. ‘Not lately. I take it that’s where we’re going?’
‘Yes, but I can’t say where exactly. You’ll have to find out for yourself. Manoukhian, can you hold her steady for the next minute or so?’
‘Take your time, Zeb.’
She unbuckled from her acceleration couch and stood over Clavain. It appeared that the stripes were zones of distinct pigmentation rather than tattoos or skin paint. Zebra flipped open a locker and slid out a metallic-blue box the size of a medical kit. She opened it and dithered her finger over the contents, like someone puzzling over a box of chocolates. She pulled out a hypodermic device.
i’m going to put you under, Mr Clavain. While you’re unconscious I’ll run some neurological tests, just to verify that you really are a Conjoiner. I won’t wake you until we’ve arrived at our destination.‘
‘There’s no need to do that.’
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