“I’m going to let you warm, do you understand? For the last few decades it’s been all we can do to keep you as cool as possible—but it hasn’t worked, so maybe it was never the right approach. Maybe what we need to do now is let you take over the damned ship, in whatever way you see fit.”
“I don’t think—”
“I don’t care what you think, captain. I’m doing it anyway.”
Her finger grew tight against the needler’s trigger; already she was mentally calculating how his rate of spread would increase as he warmed, and the numbers she was coming up with were not quite believable… but then, they had never considered doing this before.
“Please, Ilia.”
“Listen, svinoi,” she said, finally. “Maybe it works; maybe it doesn’t. But if I’ve ever shown any loyalty to you—if you even remember me—all I’m asking is that you do what you can for us.”
She was about to fire; about to unload the needler into the reefer, but then something made her hesitate.
“There’s one other thing I have to say to you. Which is that I think I know who the hell you are, or rather who the hell you became.”
She was acutely conscious of the dryness of her mouth, and of the time she was wasting, but something made her continue.
“What do you have to say to me?”
“You travelled with Sajaki to the Pattern Jugglers, didn’t you? I know. The crew spoke of it often enough—even Sajaki himself. What no one discussed was what happened down there: what the Jugglers did to the two of you. Oh, I know there were rumours—but that’s all they were; engineered by Sajaki to throw me off the scent.”
“Nothing happened there.”
“No; what happened was this. You killed Sajaki, all those years ago.”
His answer came back, amused, as if he had misheard her. “I killed Sajaki?”
“You had the Jugglers do it; had them erase his neural patterns and overlay your own on his mind. You became him.”
Now she had to catch her breath, although she was almost done.
“One existence wasn’t enough for you—and maybe by then you’d sensed that this body wasn’t going to last too long; not with so many viruses flying around. So you colonised your adjutant, and the Jugglers did what you wished because they’re so alien they couldn’t even grasp the concept of murder. But that’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“No…”
“Shut up. That’s why Sajaki never wanted you healed—because by then he was you, and he didn’t need healing. And that’s why Sajaki was able to denature my treatment for the plague—because he had all your expertise. I should let you die for this, svinoi—except of course you already are, because what’s left of Sajaki is now redecorating the medical centre.”
“Sajaki—dead?” It was as if her news of the others’ deaths had not reached him at all.
“Is that justice for you? You’re alone now. All on your own. So the only thing you can do is protect your own existence against Sun Stealer by growing. By letting the plague have its way with you.”
“No… please.”
“Did you kill Sajaki, Captain?”
“It was… such a long time ago…” But there was something in his voice which was not quite denial. Volyova delivered the needler rounds into the reefer. Watched the few remaining indices on its shell flicker and die, and then felt the chill fading, by the second, ice on the shell already beginning to glisten with its own warming.
“I’m going now,” she said. “I just wanted to get to the truth. I suppose I should wish you good luck, Captain.”
And then she was running, afraid of what might be happening behind her.
Sajaki’s suit stayed tantalisingly ahead of Sylveste as they commenced the descent into the funnel of the bridgehead. The half-submerged, inverted cone of the device had seemed tiny only minutes ago, but now it was all he could see, its steep grey sides blocking the horizon in all directions. Occasionally the bridgehead shuddered, and Sylveste was reminded that it was fighting a constant battle with the crustal defences of Cerberus, and that he should not count blindly on its protection. If it failed, he knew, it would be consumed in hours; the wound in the crust would close, and with it his escape route.
“It is necessary to replenish reaction mass,” the suit said.
“What?”
Sajaki spoke for the first time since they had left the ship. “We used a lot of mass getting here, Dan. We need to top up before we enter hostile territory.”
“Where from?”
“Look around you. There’s an awful lot of reaction mass waiting to be used.”
Of course; there was nothing to stop them drawing resources from the bridgehead itself. He agreed, doing nothing while Sajaki took control of his suit. One of the steep, incurving walls loomed nearer, dense with ornate extrusions and random clusters of machinery. The scale of the thing was overwhelming now; like a dam wall which curved round until its ends met. Somewhere in that wall, he thought, were the bodies of Alicia and her fellow mutineers…
There was enough sense of gravity to engender a strong sense of vertigo, not aided by the way the bridgehead narrowed below, which made it seem like an infinitely deep shaft. The best part of a kilometre away, the star-shaped speck of Sajaki’s suit had made contact with the precipitous wall on the far side. A few moments later Sylveste touched a narrow ledge, one that jutted no more than a metre beyond the wall. His feet made soft contact and suddenly he was poised there, ready to topple back into the nothingness behind him.
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing,” Sajaki said. “Your suit knows exactly what to do. I suggest you start trusting it: it’s all that’s keeping you alive.”
“Is that meant to reassure me?”
“Do you think reassurance would be especially appropriate at this point? You’re about to enter one of the most alien environments that any human has ever known. I think the last thing you need is reassurance.”
While Sylveste watched, a trunk extruded from the suit’s chest until it made contact with a section of the bridgehead’s wall material. A few seconds later it began to pulse, bulges squirming along its length, back into the suit.
“Vile,” Sylveste said.
“It’s digesting heavy elements from the bridgehead,” Sajaki said. “The bridgehead gives of itself freely, since it recognises the suit as being friendly.”
“What if we run out of power inside Cerberus?”
“You’ll be dead long before running out of power becomes a problem to your suit. But it needs to replenish reaction mass for its thrusters. It has all the energy it needs, but it still requires atoms to accelerate.”
“I’m not sure I like that last bit; about being dead.”
“It isn’t too late to return.”
Testing me, Sylveste thought. For a moment he considered it rationally, but only for a moment. He was scared, yes—more so than he could comfortably remember; even if he went back to Lascaille’s Shroud. But, as then, he knew that the only way to punch through his fear was to push on. To confront whatever it was that led to that fear. But, when the refuelling process was complete, it took all the nerve in the world to step off the ledge and continue the descent into the emptiness enclosed by the bridgehead.
They sank lower, dropping for long seconds before checking their fall with brief squirts of thrust. Sajaki was beginning to allow Sylveste some voluntary control of his suit now; slowly decreasing the suit’s autonomic dominance until Sylveste was controlling most of it himself; the transition was barely noticeable. They were descending now at a rate of thirty metres per second, but it seemed to quicken as the walls of the funnel came closer together. Now Sajaki was only a few hundred metres away, but the facelessness of his suit offered little sense of human presence, no sense of companionship. Sylveste still felt dreadfully alone. And with good reason, he thought—it was possible that no thinking creature had been this close to Cerberus since it was last visited by the Amarantin. What ghosts had festered here in the intervening thousand centuries?