Perhaps a part of him was still refusing to believe, despite all the evidence.
What evidence, though? Apart from the reinstated signal—and all that it implied—there was nothing to suggest that Sun Stealer had reached beyond the gunnery. But if he had…
“You,” Volyova said, breaking the silence. She was pointing her gun at Hegazi. “You, svinoi. You had to have a part in this, didn’t you? Sajaki’s out of the frame, and Sylveste doesn’t have the expertise—so it had to be you.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Helping Sun Stealer. You did it, didn’t you?”
“Get a grip, Triumvir.”
Khouri wondered in which direction she should be pointing the plasma-rifle. Sylveste looked as shaken as Hegazi; as surprised at Volyova’s sudden line of enquiry.
“Listen,” Khouri said. “Just because he’s had his tongue up Sajaki’s arse ever since I came aboard, it doesn’t mean he’d do anything that stupid.”
“Thanks,” Hegazi said. “I think.”
“You’re not off the hook,” Volyova said. “Not by a long mark. Khouri’s right; doing what you did would have been an act of gross stupidity. But that hardly disqualifies you from having done it. You had enough expertise to do it. And you’re chimeric as well—maybe Sun Stealer’s in you too. In which case I’m afraid it’s just too dangerous to have you around.”
She nodded at Khouri. “Khouri; take him down to one of the airlocks.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Hegazi said, as she prodded him along the flooded corridor with the barrel of the plasma-rifle, watching janitor-rats scatter ahead of them. “That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? You’re going to space me.”
“She just wants you somewhere where you can’t do any harm,” Khouri said, not especially in the mood for a protracted conversation with her prisoner.
“Whatever it was she thinks, I didn’t do it. Sorry to admit it, but I haven’t got the expertise. Does that satisfy you?”
Now he was annoying her, but she sensed that he would only shut up if she talked back to him.
“I’m not sure you did do it,” she said. “After all, you’d have had to make the arrangements before you had any idea that Volyova was going to sabotage her weapon. You can’t have done it since; you’ve been on the bridge the whole time.”
They had reached the nearest airlock. It was a small unit, just large enough to take a suited human. Like virtually everything else in this part of the ship, the controls on the door were caked in grime and corrosion and odd fungal growth. Yet it still functioned, miraculously.
“So why are you doing this?” Hegazi asked, as the door hummed open and she poked him into the cramped, sullenly lit interior. “If you don’t think I was capable of doing it?”
“It’s because I don’t like you,” she said, and closed the door on him.
THIRTY
When they were at last alone in their quarters, Pascale said, “You can’t go through with this, Dan. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He was tired; they all were, but with his mind racing, the last thing he felt like now was sleep. Still, if the bridgehead survived long enough for his entry into Cerberus to proceed as planned, now might be the last opportunity he had for proper sleep for tens of hours; perhaps even days. He would need to be functioning as keenly as he ever had in his life when he descended beneath the alien world. Yet now, obviously, Pascale was going to do her best to talk him out of it.
“It’s far too late now,” he said, wearily. “We’ve already announced ourselves; done harm to Cerberus. The world knows of our presence; already knows something of our nature. My entering it won’t make much difference now, except that I’ll learn much more than Volyova’s clunking spy robots will ever tell me.”
“You can’t know what’s waiting for you down there, Dan.”
“Yes, I can. An answer to what happened to the Amarantin. Can’t you see that humanity needs to have that information?”
He could see that she did, if only on some theoretical level. But she said, “What if it was the same kind of curiosity you’re showing now that brought extinction upon them? You saw what happened to the Lorean.”
Once again he thought of Alicia, dying in that attack. What exactly was it that had made him so unwilling to spare the time that would have been needed to recover her body from the wreck? Even now, the way he had ordered that she go down with the bridgehead struck him as chillingly impersonal, as if—for a fleeting instant—it had not been him giving that order; not even Calvin, but something hiding behind both of them. The thought made him flinch, so he crushed it beneath conscious concern, the way one crushed an insect.
“Then we’ll know, won’t we?” he said. “Finally, we’ll know. And even if it kills us, someone else will know what happened—someone on Resurgam, or even in another system. You have to understand, Pascale, that I think it’s worth that kind of risk.”
“There’s more to it than just curiosity, isn’t there?” She looked at him, obviously expecting some kind of answer. He just looked back at her, knowing how intimidating the lack of focus of his gaze could be, until she continued speaking. “Khouri was put aboard to kill you. She even admitted as much. Volyova said she was sent here by someone who might have been Carine Lefevre.”
“That’s not only impossible, it’s insulting.”
“But it still might be the truth. And there might be more to it than just a personal vendetta, too. Maybe Lefevre did die, after all, but something assumed her shape, inherited her body, or whatever—something that knows the danger you’re playing with. Can’t you at least accept that as a remote possibility?”
“Nothing that happened around Lascaille’s Shroud can have any bearing on what happened to the Amarantin.”
“How can you be so damned sure?”
Angry now, he said, “Because I was there! Because I went where Lascaille went, into Revelation Space, and what they’d shown Lascaille, they showed to me.” He tried to calm his voice, taking both of Pascale’s hands in his own. “They were ancient; so alien they made me shiver. They touched my mind. I saw them… and they were nothing like the Amarantin.”
For the first time since leaving Resurgam, he thought back to that instant of screaming comprehension, as his damaged contact module had skirted the Shroud. Old as fossils, the Shrouders’ minds had crawled into his; a moment of abyssal knowing. What Lascaille had said was true. They might have been alien in their biology, inspiring a kind of visceral revulsion simply because they were so far from what the human mind considered the right and proper form for sentience, but in the dynamics of their thought, they were a lot closer to people than their shapes would ever have implied. For a moment, the strangeness of that dichotomy troubled him… but it could not have been otherwise, for how else could the Pattern Jugglers have wired his mind to think like a Shrouder, if the basic modes of thought were not similar? Then he remembered the festering queasiness of their communion—and a spillage of memory crashing over him, a glimpse of the vastness of Shrouder history. Across millions of years, they had scoured a younger galaxy than the present one, hunting down and collecting the discarded and dangerous playthings of other, even older, civilisations. Now those fabulous things were almost within reach; behind the membrane of the Shroud… and he had almost tricked his way inside. And then something else…
Something parting, momentarily, like a curtain, or a gap in clouds—something so fleeting, he had almost forgotten it until the present moment. Something revealed to him that should have remained hidden—hidden behind layers of identity. The identity and memories of a long-dead race… worn as camouflage…