“You understand that, don’t you? I have to go this extra mile, just so I can silence these phantoms. Perhaps I owe Khouri thanks for that. She’s given me a reason to take this step, when my fear of what I’ll find is the greatest I’ve known. I don’t believe she—or any of them—are bad people. And not you, either, Pascale. I know you were persuaded by what they said, but that wasn’t your fault. You tried to talk me out of it because you love me. And what I was doing—what I was going to do—hurt me more, because I knew I was betraying that love.
“Does that make any sense to you? And will you be able to forgive me when I get back? It won’t be long, Pascale—no more than five days; maybe a lot less.” He paused again, before adding a final postscript: “I took Calvin with me. He’s in me now, as I speak. I’d be lying if we said that the two of us haven’t come to a new… equilibrium. I think he’ll prove of value to me.”
And then the image on the paper faded.
“You know,” Khouri said, “there have been moments when he almost had my sympathy. But I think he’s just blown it.”
“You said Pascale had taken it badly.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“It depends. Maybe he was right: maybe she always knew it would come to this. Maybe she should have thought twice before marrying the svinoi.”
“You think he’s got far?”
Volyova looked at the paper again, as if hoping to siphon fresh wisdom from its wrinkles.
“He must have had assistance. There aren’t many of us left who could have helped him. No one, really, if you discount Sajaki.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have discounted him. Perhaps his medichines healed him faster than we expected.”
“No,” Volyova said. She tapped her magic bracelet. “I know where the Triumvirate is at any moment. Hegazi’s still in the airlock; Sajaki’s in the clinic.”
“You mind if we check on them, just in case?”
Volyova grabbed another layer of clothing, warm enough that she could enter any of the pressurised parts of the ship without catching hypothermia. She slipped the needler into her belt, then slung over one shoulder the heavy ordnance Khouri had obtained from the warchive. It was a dual-gripped hypervelocity sports slug-gun from the twenty-third century; a product of the first Europan Demarchy, clad in curving black neoprene, ruby-eyed Chinese dragons in beaten gold and silver worked into the sides.
“Not in the slightest,” she said.
They reached the airlock where Hegazi had been waiting all this time, with nothing to amuse himself but the contemplation of his reflection in the chamber’s burnished steel walls. That at least was how Volyova imagined it, in the rare moments when she bothered to give the imprisoned Triumvir any thought at all. She did not really hate Hegazi, or even particularly dislike him. He was too weak for that; too obviously a creature incapable of dwelling anywhere except in Sajaki’s shadow.
“Did he give you any trouble?” Volyova asked.
“Not really, except that he kept protesting his innocence; saying it wasn’t him who had released Sun Stealer from the gunnery. Sounded like he meant it as well.”
“It’s an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.”
Volyova shrugged back the Chinese-dragon gun and landed her fists on the handle which would open the airlock inner door. Her feet were already planted apart in the sludge.
She struggled.
“I can’t open it.”
“Let me try.” Khouri pushed her gently aside and tried to work the handle. “No,” she said, after grunting and then relenting. “It’s jammed tight. I can’t move it.”
“You didn’t weld it shut or anything like that?”
“Yes, stupid me, I forgot.”
Volyova knuckled the door. “Hegazi, you hear me? What have you done to the door? It won’t open.”
There was no answer.
“He’s in there,” Volyova said, consulting her bracelet again. “But maybe he can’t hear us through the armour.”
“I don’t like this,” Khouri said. “There was nothing wrong with that door when I left it. I think we should shoot the lock.” Without waiting for Volyova’s agreement, she said, “Hegazi? If you can hear this, we’re shooting our way in.”
In a flash she had the plasma-rifle in one hand, its weight drawing the muscles taut in her forearm. She was shielding her face with the other hand, looking away.
“Wait,” Volyova said. “We’re being too hasty. What if the outer door is open? The vacuum would trip the pressure-sensors and lock the inner door.”
“If that’s the case, Hegazi isn’t going to be causing us any more problems. Not unless he can hold his breath for a few hours.”
“Granted—but we still don’t want to put a hole in that door.”
Khouri moved closer.
If there was a panel showing the pressure status beyond the door, it was well-concealed behind the grime.
“I can set the beam to its narrowest collimation. Put a needle-hole in the door.”
“Do it,” Volyova said, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Change of plan, Hegazi. Gonna put a hole in the top of the door. If you’re standing up, now would be a good time to sit down, maybe think about putting your affairs in order.”
There was still no answer.
It was almost an insult to the plasma-rifle to ask it to do this, Volyova thought—too precise and dainty an operation by far, like using an industrial laser to cut a wedding cake. But Khouri did it anyway. There was a flash and a crack, as the gun spat a tiny elongated seed of ball-lightning into the door. For a moment smoke coiled from the woodworm-sized hole which she had cut.
But only for a second.
Then something spurted from the door, in a dark hissing arc.
She wasted no time putting a bigger hole in the door. By then, neither Khouri nor Volyova considered it very likely that there was going to be anyone living behind the airlock. Either Hegazi was dead—and there was no guessing how—or Hegazi had already left the lock, and this jetting stream of high-pressure fluid was his perplexing idea of a message to his former captors.
Khouri shot through, and the stream became an arm-thick eruption of the brackish fluid, ramming out with such explosive force that she was thrown backwards into the ship-sludge underfoot, plasma-rifle clattering into the same pool of ankle-deep effluent. The stuff hissed fiercely as it touched the gun’s hot maw. By the time she had struggled to her feet, however, the flow had dwindled to a dribble, slurping in noisy eructions through the punctured door. She picked up the gun and shook the muck off it, wondering if it would work again.
“It’s ship-slime,” Volyova said. “The same stuff we’re standing in. I’d recognise that stench anywhere.”
“The lock was full of ship-slime?”
“Don’t ask me how. Just open a bigger hole in the door.”
Khouri did so, until she could squeeze her arm through and work the lock’s interior controls without brushing against the plasma-heated edges of the cut metal. Volyova was right, she thought, it had been the pressure switches which had tripped the locking mechanism. The chamber must have been pumped to bursting with ship-slime.
The door opened, allowing a final slick of slime to ooze into the corridor.
Along with what remained of Hegazi. It was unclear whether this stemmed from the pressure he had been subjected to, or its explosive release, but his metal and flesh components seemed to have arrived at a less than amicable separation.
THIRTY-ONE