Once Sun Stealer might have been Amarantin. But he had changed, perhaps deliberately, through the selective pressure of genetic engineering, sculpting himself and his Banished brethren into a new species entirely. They had reshaped their anatomy for flight in zero-gravity; grown immense wings. She could see those wings now; looming behind the curved, sleek head which seemed to thrust down towards her.
The head was a skull. The eye sockets were not exactly vacant; not exactly hollow, but seemed abrim with reservoirs of something infinitely black and infinitely deep, as dark and depthless as she imagined the membrane of a Shroud. The bones of Sun Stealer shone with colourless lustre.
“Despite what I said earlier,” she said, when the initial shock of what she was seeing had passed, or at least subdued to a point where she could tolerate it, “I think you could have found a way to kill me by now. If that was what you wanted.”
“You cannot guess what I want.”
When he spoke there was just a wordless absence which somehow made sense, as if carved from silence. The creature’s complex jawbones did not move at all. Speech, she remembered of the Amarantin, had never been an important mode of communication. Their society had been based around visual display. Something so basic would surely have been preserved, even after Sun Stealer’s flock had departed Resurgam and commenced their transformations; transformations so radical that when they later returned to the world they would be mistaken for winged gods.
“I know what you don’t want,” Volyova said. “You don’t want anything to stop Sylveste reaching Cerberus. That’s why we have to die now; in case we find a way to stop him.”
“His mission is of great importance to me,” Sun Stealer said, then seemed to reconsider. “To us. To us who survived.”
“Survived what?” Maybe this would be her one and only chance to come to any understanding. “No; wait—what else could you have survived, but the death of the Amarantin? Is that what it was? Did you somehow find a way not to die?”
“You know by now the place where I entered Sylveste.” It was less a question, more a flat statement. Volyova wondered to how much of their discourse Sun Stealer had been privy?
“It had to be Lascaille’s Shroud,” she said. “That was the only thing that made sense—although not much, I admit.”
“That was where we sought sanctuary; for nine hundred and ninety thousand years.”
The coincidence was too great not to mean something. “Ever since life ended on Resurgam.”
“Yes.” The word trailed off into a hiss of sibilance. “The Shrouds were of our designing; the last desperate enterprise of our Flock, even after those who stayed behind on the surface were incinerated.”
“I don’t understand. What Lascaille said, and Sylveste himself found out…”
“They were not shown the truth. Lascaille was shown a fiction—our identity replaced by that of a much older culture, utterly unlike ourselves. The true purpose of the Shrouds was not revealed to him. He was shown a lie which would encourage others to come.”
Volyova could see how that lie would have worked, now. Lascaille had been told that the Shrouds were repositories for harmful technologies—things humanity secretly craved, such as methods of faster-than-light travel. When Lascaille had revealed this to Sylveste, it had only increased Sylveste’s desire to break into the Shroud. He had been able to muster the support of the entire Demarchist society around Yellowstone towards’ that goal, for the rewards would be dazzling beyond comprehension for the first faction to unlock such alien mysteries.
“But if it was a lie,” she said, “what was the true function of the Shrouds?”
“We built them to hide inside, Triumvir Volyova.” It seemed to be playing with her, enjoying her confusion. “They were places of sanctuary. Zones of restructured spacetime, within which we could shelter.”
“Shelter from whom?”
“The ones who survived the Dawn War. The ones who were given the name of the Inhibitors.”
She nodded. There was much she did not understand, but one thing was now clear to her. What Khouri had told her—the fragments that the woman remembered from the strange dream she had been vouchsafed in the gunnery—had been something like the truth. Khouri had not remembered everything, and the parts had not always been related to Volyova in the right order, but it was obvious now that this was only because Khouri had been expected to grasp something too huge, too alien—too apocalyptic—for her mind to comfortably hold. She had done her best, but her best had not been good enough. But now Volyova was being accorded disclosure of parts of the same picture, although from an oddly different perspective.
Khouri had been told about the Dawn War by the Mademoiselle, who had not wanted Sylveste to succeed. Yet Sun Stealer desired that outcome more than anything else.
“What is it about?” she asked. “I know what you’re doing here; you’re delaying me; keeping me waiting because you know I’ll do anything to hear the answers you have. And you’re right, in a way. I have to know. I have to know everything.”
Sun Stealer waited, silently, and then continued to answer all the questions she had for it.
When she was done, Volyova decided that she could profitably use one of the slugs in her clip. She shot the display; the great glass globe shattered into a billion icy shards, Sun Stealer’s face disrupting in the same explosion.
Khouri and Pascale took the circuitous route to the clinic, avoiding elevators and the kind of well-repaired corridors through which drones could easily travel. They kept their guns drawn at all times, and preferred to blast anything that looked even vaguely suspicious, even if it later turned out to be nothing more than a chance alignment of shadows or a disturbingly shaped accretion of corrosion on a wall or bulkhead.
“Did he give you any kind of warning he was going to leave so soon?” Khouri asked.
“No; not this soon. I mean, I thought he would try it at some point, but I tried talking him out of it.”
“How do you feel about him?”
“What do you expect me to say? He was my husband. We were in love.” Pascale seemed to collapse then; Khouri reached out to catch her. The woman wiped tears from her eyes, rubbing them red. “I hate him for what he’s done—you would as well. I don’t understand him, either. But I still love him despite it. I keep thinking… maybe he’s dead already. It’s possible, isn’t it? And even if he isn’t, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever see him again.”
“It can’t be a very safe place he’s going to,” Khouri said, and then wondered if Cerberus was any more dangerous than the ship, now.
“No, I know. I don’t think even he realises how much danger he’s in—or the rest of us.”
“Still, your husband isn’t just anyone. It’s Sylveste we’re talking about here.” Khouri reminded Pascale that Sylveste’s life had been shot through with a core of rare luck, and that it would be strange if that fortune should desert him now, when the thing that he had always reached for was almost within his grasp. “He’s a slippery bastard, and I think there’s still a good chance he’ll find a way out of this.”
That seemed to calm Pascale, fractionally.
Then Khouri told her that Hegazi was dead and that the ship appeared to be trying to murder everyone else left aboard it. “Sajaki can’t be here,” Pascale said. “I mean, he can’t, can he? Dan wouldn’t know how to find his own way to Cerberus. He’d need one of you to go with him.”