“Approaching the final injection tube,” Sajaki said.
The conic walls constricted now to a diameter of only thirty metres, then plunged vertically into darkness, as far as the eye could see. His suit veered towards the midline of the approaching hole without his bidding; Sajaki’s suit lagged slightly behind.
“I wouldn’t deny you the honour of being first in,” said the Triumvir. “You’ve waited for it long enough, after all.”
They were in the shaft. Sensing their arrival, the walls lit up with recessed red lights. The impression of vertical speed was huge now, and more than a little sickening; too much like being injected down a syringe. Sylveste remembered the time when Calvin had shown him the passage of an endoscope through one of his patients; the ancient surgical tool with a camera eye at one end of its coiled length. He remembered the headlong rush along an artery. He remembered the night flight to Cuvier after he had been arrested at the obelisk excavation, streaking through canyons towards his political nemesis. He wondered if there had ever been a time in his life when he was certain of what lay at the end of those rushing walls.
Then the shaft vanished and they were dropping through emptiness.
Volyova reached the hangar chamber, pausing at one of the observation windows to check that the shuttles really were accounted for, and that the data she had seen on her bracelet had not been manipulated by Sun Stealer. The plasma-winged transatmospheric ships were still there, clamped in their holding pens like rows of arrowheads in a fletcher’s workshop. She could begin powering one of them now, via the bracelet, but that was too dangerous, too likely to draw Sun Stealer’s attention and alert him to what she was planning. At the moment she was safe enough, since she had not entered a part of the ship where Sun Stealer’s senses could penetrate. At least, she hoped not.
She could not simply stroll aboard any of the shuttles. The usual access routes would take her through parts of the ship she did not dare enter; places where servitors had free range and janitor-rats were in direct biochemical consort with Sun Stealer. She had only one weapon now: the needler. She had left Khouri with the slug-gun, and while she did not doubt her proficiency, there were limits to what could be achieved by mere skill and determination. Especially as the ship would by now have had time to synthesise armed drones.
So now she found her way to an airlock chamber; not one which led to outside space, but one which accessed the depressurised vault of the hangar. The chamber was knee-deep in effluent, and all its lighting and heating systems had failed. Good. No chance then of Sun Stealer being able to watch her remotely, or even know she was there. She opened a locker and was relieved to find that the lightweight suit it was meant to contain was still present, and that it had not been visibly damaged by exposure to ship-slime. It was less bulky than the kind of suit Sylveste would have taken; less intelligent too, with no servosystems or integral propulsion. Before donning the suit she recited a series of words—well rehearsed—into her bracelet, and then arranged the bracelet to respond to vocal commands spoken into her communicator, rather than via its own acoustic sensors. Then she had to latch on a thruster backpack, taking a moment to stare intently at its controls, as if knowledge of how to use it would bubble up from her memory by sheer force of will. She decided that the basics would come back to her as soon as she required them, and carefully stowed the needler on the suit’s external equipment belt. She exited without fuss, jetting into the hangar, using a small constant thrust level to prevent herself drifting down the chamber. No part of the ship was in freefall, since the ship itself was not orbiting Cerberus, but holding itself artificially fixed in space, a tiny drain on the power of its engines.
She selected the shuttle she would use; the spherical Melancholia of Departure. Off to one side of the chamber, she watched a pair of bottle-green servitors detach from their mooring points and sidle towards her. They were free-fliers; spheres sprouting claws and cutting equipment for performing repair work on the shuttles. Evidently she had passed into Sun Stealer’s perceptual domain when she entered the hangar. Well, she couldn’t help that, and she had not brought the needler along to assist as an incentive in delicate negotiations with non-sentient machines. She shot them, each requiring more than one needle-strike before she interrupted a critical system.
Hit, both machines began to drift down the hangar, bleeding smoke.
She thumbed the backpack controls, imploring it to push her faster. The Melancholia loomed larger now; she could already see the tiny warning signs and technical phrases dotted around its fuselage, although most of them were in obsolete languages.
From around the curve of the shuttle hove another drone. This one was larger, its ochre body an ellipsoid studded with folded manipulators and sensors.
It was pointing something at her.
Everything turned a bright, hurting green which made her want to tear her eyeballs from their sockets. The thing was swiping a laser at her. She cursed—her suit had opaqued in time, but she was now effectively blind.
“Sun Stealer,” she said, presuming that he could hear her. “You are making a very grave mistake.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re getting good now,” she said. “You were a little stiff when we spoke earlier. What’s happened? Did you access the natural language translators?”
“The more time I spend amongst you, the better I know you.”
The suit was de-opaquing as she spoke. “Better than you did with Nagorny, at least.”
“I did not intend to give him nightmares.” Sun Stealer’s voice was still the same absence as before; like a whisper heard against the white-noise of static.
“No, I doubt that you did.” She clucked. “You don’t want to kill me, do you? The others, perhaps—but not me; not just yet. Not while the bridgehead might still need my expertise.”
“That time has passed,” Sun Stealer said. “Sylveste has now entered Cerberus.”
Not good news; not good news at all—although, rationally, she had known for some hours that it was probably the case.
“Then there must be another reason,” she said. “Another reason why you need the bridgehead to stay open. It can’t be that you care about Sylveste making it back. But if the bridgehead fails, you wouldn’t necessarily know that he had progressed any deeper into the structure. You need to know, don’t you? You need to know how deeply he gets; whether he achieves whatever it is you have in mind for him.”
She took Sun Stealer’s lack of response as a tacit acknowledgement that she was not far from the truth. Perhaps the alien had not yet learnt all the ways of subterfuge, arts which might be uniquely human and therefore new to him.
“Let me take the shuttle,” she said.
“A vessel of this configuration is too large to enter Cerberus, even if you intend to reach Sylveste.”
Did it honestly imagine she had not thought of that herself? For a moment she felt pity that Sun Stealer was so singularly ill-equipped to grasp the way the human mind functioned. On one level he worked well enough; when he could lay lures of fear or reward; lures which depended on the emotions. It was not that his logic was faulty, either—more that he had an overestimation of how important it was in human affairs: as if pointing out to Volyova the essentially suicidal nature of her intended mission was going to suddenly deter her; turn her willingly to his side. Oh, you poor, pitiful monster, she thought.