“There’s no machinery in my head. And I don’t know anything about any shadows.”
The voice shifted its tone, adjusting its timbre and resonance until it sounded exactly as if there was a small, quiet friend whispering confidences into her ear.
[But you do know, Rashmika. You just haven’t remembered yet. We can see all the barricades in your head. They’re beginning to come down, but it will take a little while yet. But that’s all right. We’ve waited a long time to find a friend. We can wait a little longer.]
“I think I should call Grelier,” she said. Before he left, the surgeon-general had shown her how to access the cathedral’s pneumatic intercom system. She leant over the bed, towards the bedside table. There was a grilled panel above it.
[No, Rashmika,] the voice warned. [Don’t call him. He’ll only look at you more closely, and you don’t want that, do you?]
“Why not?” she demanded.
[Because then he’ll find out that you aren’t who you say you are. And you wouldn’t want that.]
Her hand hesitated above the intercom. Why not press it, and summon the surgeon-general? She didn’t like the bastard, but she liked voices in her head even less.
But what the voice had said reminded her of her blood. She visualised him taking the sample, drawing the red core from her arm.
[Yes, Rashmika, that’s part of it. You don’t see it yet, but when he analyses that sample he’ll be in for a shock. But he may leave it at that. What you don’t want is him crawling over your head with a scanner. Then he’d really find something interesting.]
Her hand still hovered above the intercom, but she knew she was not going to press the connecting button. The voice was right: the one thing she did not want was Grelier taking an even deeper interest in her, beyond her blood. She did not know why, but it was enough to know it.
“I’m scared,” she said, moving her hand away.
[You don’t have to be. We’re here to help you, Rashmika.]
“Me?” she said.
[All of you,] the voice said. She sensed it pulling away, leaving her alone. [All we ask of you is a little favour in return.]
Afterwards, she tried to sleep.
Scorpio looked over the technician’s shoulder. Glued to one wall was a large flexible screen, newly grown by the manufactories. It showed a cross section through the ship, duplicated from the latest version of the hand-drawn map that had been used to track the Captain’s apparitions. Rather than the schematic of a spacecraft, it resembled a blow-up of some medieval anatomy illustration. The technician was marking a cross next to a confluence of tunnels, near to one of the acoustic listening posts.
“Any joy?” Scorpio asked.
The other pig made a noncommittal noise. “Probably not. False positives from this area all day. There’s a hot bilge pump near this sector. Keeps clanging, setting off our phones”.
“Better check it out all the same, just to be on the safe side,” Scorpio advised.
“There’s a team already on their way down there. They’ve never been far away.”
Scorpio knew that the team would be going down in full vacuum-gear, warned that they might encounter a breach at any point, even deep within the ship. “Tell them to be careful,” he said.
“I have, Scorp, but they could be even more careful if they knew what they needed to be careful about.”
“They don’t need to know.”
The pig technician shrugged and went back to his task, waiting for another acoustic or barometric signal to appear on his read-out.
Scorpio’s thoughts drifted to the hypometric weapon mov-ing in its shaft, a corkscrewing, meshing, interweaving gyre of myriad silver blades. Even immobile, the weapon had felt subtly wrong, a discordant presence in the ship. It was like a picture of an impossible solid, one of those warped triangles or ever-rising staircases; a thing that looked plausible enough at first glance but which on closer inspection produced the effect of a knife twisting in a particular part of the brain—an area responsible for handling representations of the external universe, ah area that handled the mechanics of what did and didn’t work. Moving, it was worse. Scorpio could barely look at the threshing, squirming complexity of the operational weapon. Somewhere within that locus of shining motion, there was a point or region where something sordid was being done to the basic fabric of space-time. It was being abused.
That the technology was alien had come as no surprise to Scorpio. The weapon—and the two others like it—had been assembled according to instructions passed to the Conjoiners by Aura, before Skade had stolen her from Khouri’s womb. The instructions had been precise and comprehensive, a series of unambiguous mathematical prescriptions, but utterly lacking any context—no hint of how the weapon actually functioned, or which particular model of reality had to apply for it to work. The instructions simply said: just build it, calibrate it in this fashion, and it will work. But do not ask how or why, because even if you were capable of understanding the answers, you would find them upsetting.
The only other hint of context was this: the hypometric weapon represented a general class of weakly acausal technologies usually developed by pre-Inhibitor-phase Galactic cultures within the second or third million years of their star-faring history. There were layers of technology beyond this, Aura’s information had implied, but they could certainly not be assembled using human tools. The weapons in that theoretical arsenal bore the same abstract relationship to the hypometric device as a sophisticated computer virus did to a stone axe. Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human anymore.
The message was: make the most of what you have.
“Teams are there,” the other pig said, pressing a microphone into the little pastry like twist of his ear.
“Found anything?”
“Just that pump playing up again.”
“Shut it down,” Scorpio said. “We can deal with the bilge later.”
“Shut it down, sir? That’s a schedule-one pump.”
“I know. You’re probably going to tell me it hasn’t been turned off in twenty-three years.”.
“It’s been turned off, sir, but always with a replacement unit standing by to take over. We don’t have a replacement available now, and won’t be able to get one down there for days. All service teams are tied up following other acoustic leads.”
“How bad would it be?”
“About as bad as it gets. Unless we install a replacement unit, we’ll lose three or four decks within a few hours.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to lose them. Is your equipment sophisticated enough to filter out the sounds of those decks being flooded?”
The technician hesitated for a moment, but Scorpio knew that professional pride would win out in the end. “That shouldn’t be a problem, no.”
“Then look on the bright side. Those fluids have to come from somewhere. We’ll be taking the load off some other pumps, more than likely.”
“Yes, sir,” the pig said, more resigned than convinced. He gave the order to his team, telling them to sacrifice those levels. He had to repeat the instruction several times before the message got through that he was serious and that he had Scorpio’s authorisation.