You?
[Me, Rashmika. Yes.]
Why are you here?
[To help you. How much do you remember? All of it, or only some of it? Do you remember anything at all?]
Aloud, Vasko said, “Propulsion, Dean? Are you saying you want our ship to take you somewhere?”
“Not exactly, no,” Quaiche replied.
Rashmika tried not to look at the woman, keeping her attention focused on the men instead. I don’t remember much, only that I don’t belong here. The shadows already found me out. Do you know about the shadows, Khouri?
[A little. Not as much as you.]
Can you answer any of my questions? Who sent me here? What was I supposed to do?
[We sent you here.] In her peripheral vision Rashmika saw the woman’s head nod by the slightest of degrees: silent, discreet affirmation that it was really her voice Rashmika was hearing. [But it was your decision. Nine years ago, Rashmika, you told us we had to put you on Hela, in the care of another family.]
Why?
[To learn things, to find out as much as you could about Hela and the scuttlers, from the inside. To reach the dean.]
Why?
[Because the dean was the only way of reaching Haldora. We thought Haldora was the key: the only route to the shadows. We didn’t know he’d already used it. You told us that, Rashmika. You found the short cut.]
The suit?
[That’s what we came for. And you, of course.]
Whatever your plan was, it’s going wrong. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?
[You’re safe, Rashmika. He doesn’t know you have anything to do with us.]
If he finds out?
[We’ll protect you. I’ll protect you, no matter what happens. You have my word on that.]
She looked into the woman’s face, daring Quaiche to notice. Why would you care about me?
[Because I’m your mother.]
Look into my eyes. Say it again.
Khouri did. And though Rashmika watched her face intently for the slightest indication of a lie, there was none. She supposed that meant Khouri was telling the truth.
There was shock, a stinging sense of denial, but it was not nearly as great as Rashmika might have expected. She had, by then, already begun to doubt much of what passed for her assumed history. The shadows—and, of course, Surgeon-General Grelier—had already convinced her that she had not been born on Hela, and that the people in the Vigrid badlands could not be her real parents. So what remained was a void waiting to be filled with facts, rather than one truth waiting to be displaced by another.
So here it was. There was still much she needed to remember for herself, but the essence was this: she was an agent of Ultras— these Ultras, specifically—and she had been put on Hela on an intelligence-gathering mission. Her actual memories had been suppressed, and in their place she had a series of vague, generic snapshots of early life on Hela. They were like a theatrical backdrop: convincing enough to pass muster provided they were not the object of attention themselves. But when the shadows had told her about her false past, she had seen the early memories for what they were.
The woman said she was Rashmika’s mother. She had no reason to doubt her—her face had conveyed no indication of a lie, and Rashmika already knew that her supposed mother in the badlands was only a foster parent. She felt sadness, a sense of loss, but no sense of betrayal.
She shaped a thought. I think you must be my mother.
[Do you remember me?]
I don’t know. A little. I remember someone like you, I think.
[What was I doing?]
You were standing in a palace of ice. You were crying.
Ribbons of grey-blue smoke twisted in the corridor, writhing with the shifts of air pressure. Fluid sluiced from weeping wounds in the walls and ceiling, raining down in muddy curtains. From some nearby part of the ship, Captain Seyfarth heard shouts and the rattle of automatic slug-guns, punctuated by the occasional bark of an energy weapon. He stepped through an obstacle course of bodies, his booted feet squashing limbs and heads into the ankle-deep muck that seemed to flood every level of the ship. One gauntleted hand gripped the rough handle of a throwing knife formed from the armour he had been wearing upon his arrival. The knife was already bloodied—by Seyfarth’s estimate he had killed three Ultras so far, and left another two with serious injuries—but he was still looking for something better. As he passed each body he kicked it over, checking the hands and belt for something promising. All he needed was a slug-gun.
Seyfarth was alone, the rest of his group either dead or cut off, wandering some other part of the ship. He had anticipated nothing less. Of the twenty units of the first infiltration team, Seyfarth would have been surprised if more than half a dozen survived to see the taking of the ship. Of course, he counted himself amongst the likely survivors, but based on past experience that was only to be expected. It was not, never had been, a suicide mission: just an operation with a low survival probability for most of those involved. The infiltration squad wasn’t required to survive, just to signal the fitness of the ship for the full takeover effort, using the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard. If the infiltrators were able to disrupt the defensive activities aboard the ship, creating pockets of internal confusion, then all the better. But once that signal had been sent to the surface, the survival or otherwise of Seyfarth’s unit had no bearing on subsequent events.
Given that, he thought, things were actually going tolerably well. There had been reports—fragmented, not entirely trustworthy—that the massed assault had met more resistance than expected. Certainly, the Cathedral Guard had appeared to suffer greater losses than Seyfarth had ever planned. But the massed assault had been overwhelming in scale for precisely the reason that it needed to be able to absorb huge losses and still succeed. It was shock and awe: no one needed to lecture Seyfarth on that particular doctrine. And the reports of weapons fire from elsewhere in the ship confirmed that elements of the second wave had indeed reached the Nostalgia for Infinity, together with the slug-guns they could never have smuggled past the pig.
His foot touched something.
Seyfarth knelt down, grimacing at the smell. He pushed the body over, bringing a sodden hip out of the brown muck in which it lay. He spied the tarnished gleam of a slug-gun.
Seyfarth pulled the weapon from the belt of the dead Cathedral Guardsman, shaking loose most of the muck. He checked the clip: fully loaded. The slug-gun was crudely made, mass-produced from cheap metal, but there were no electronic components in it, nothing that would have suffered from being immersed in the shipboard filth. Seyfarth tested it anyway, releasing a single slug into the nearest wall. The ship groaned as the slug went in. Now that he paid attention to it, it occurred to Seyfarth that the ship had been groaning rather a lot lately—more than he would have expected if the groans were merely structural noises. For a moment this troubled him.
Only for a moment, though.
He threw the knife away, grateful for the weighty heft of the slug-gun. It had taken nerve to come aboard the ship with only knives and a few concealed gadgets, but he had always known that if he made it this far—to the point where he had a real gun in his hand—he would make it all the way through.
It was like the end of a bad dream.
“Going somewhere?”