“I think it hurt him,” she said. “After my experience with the cache-weapon, I put Palsy back into place with a few additional interrupts. This time the paralysis would have reached much more than skin-deep. But I wish I’d installed destructive devices around the Conjoiner drives. Then we could torch the ship and run.”
“Wouldn’t that make it a bit difficult to get home?”
“Very probably. But it would certainly put an end to Sun Stealer.” As an afterthought she added, “More than that, too. Without the ship, the bridgehead would begin to fail, since there would be no more updates from the warchive. We’d have won.”
“Is that the most optimistic outcome you can think of?”
Volyova didn’t answer.
They had reached the flightdeck, which Khouri saw was as gratifyingly modern as any she had seen: all white and sterile, like a dentist’s operating room.
“Listen,” Volyova said, looking at Pascale. “I don’t know how much of this has sunk in yet, but if the bridgehead should fail now—which is what we want—it wouldn’t necessarily be good for your husband.”
“Assuming he’s reached it yet.”
“Oh, I think we can assume that.”
“On the other hand,” Khouri said, “if he’s already inside, having it fail now wouldn’t change anything, except to prevent us reaching him.” She paused, added, “That is what we’re planning, isn’t it? I mean, we have to at least try.”
“Somebody has to,” Volyova said, already buckling herself into one of the control chairs, reaching across to interface her fingers with the archaic touch-sensitive control board she affected. “Now, I strongly suggest you find yourselves somewhere to sit. We’re about to put a lot of space between ourselves and the lighthugger, in not a great deal of time.”
She had barely finished speaking when the engines came online, howling to readiness, and the previously indeterminately defined walls and floors and ceilings suddenly assumed very concrete reality. When the shaft vanished and they were dropping through emptiness, the sense of vertical speed suddenly ceasing was so great that Sylveste felt his body tense in expectation of imaginary stress. But it was illusion: they were still falling, faster now than ever, but the points of reference were so much more distant that there was little impression of motion.
He was inside Cerberus.
“Well,” Calvin said, speaking for what seemed like the first time in days, “is this all you expected?”
“This is nothing,” Sylveste said. “Just a prelude.”
But it was still the strangest artificial structure he had ever seen; the oddest place in which he had ever been confined. The crust curved over him: a world-englobing roof pierced by the narrow end of the bridgehead. The place was aglow with its own wan luminescence, seemingly generated by the immense snakes which lay in coiled complexity across what he now thought of as the floor. The huge treetrunk buttresses reached all the way to the ceiling, gnarled and organic. Now that the view was an improvement on that gained from the robotic probes, he could see that the buttresses looked more as if they had grown out of the ceiling into the floor than the other way around. Their roots blended into the floor. The firmament looked less alive; more crystalline. In a flash of insight he saw that the floor was older than the ceiling; that the ceiling had been constructed around the world after the floor was already finished. It was almost as if they stemmed from different phases of Amarantin science.
“Check your fall,” Sajaki said. “We don’t want to hit the floor too quickly. Nor do we want to stray into some defence system which the bridgehead hasn’t neutralised.”
“You think there might still be hostile elements?”
“Perhaps not on this level,” the Triumvir said. “But lower—I believe we can count on it. Such defences may not however have seen much use in the last million years, so they may be rather…” He seemed to have to search for the word. “Rusty.”
“On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t count on that either.”
“No, perhaps not.”
Suit thrust increased, and with it the feeling of gravity. Only a quarter of a gee, yet the vaulted ceiling was still an artefact of terrifying size. There was a kilometre of it between him and open space; a kilometre he would have to get through again if he ever wanted to leave. Of course, there were another thousand kilometres of planet below his feet, but he had no idea how far into those depths he would have to tunnel before he found what he was looking for. He hoped it would not be far: the nominal five days he had allotted himself for the journey and return now seemed to be cutting it dangerously close to the mark. Seen from outside, it was easy to accept Volyova’s equations of gain and loss and believe that they had some connection to reality. Here, when the forces represented by her equations had crystallised into vast and threatening structures, he had much less confidence in their predictive power.
“You’re shit-scared, aren’t you?” Calvin said.
“You can read my emotions now, is that it?”
“No. It’s just that your emotions ought to mirror mine. We think very similarly, you and I. More so than ever now.” Calvin paused. “And I don’t mind admitting—I’m very, very scared. Probably more scared than a piece of software has any right to feel. Isn’t that profound, Dan?”
“Save your profundities for later—I’m sure you’ll get the opportunity.”
“I imagine you feel insignificant,” Sajaki said, almost as if he had been listening in on the conversation. “Well; you’re justified in feeling that way. You are insignificant. That’s the majesty of this place. Would you choose it any other way?”
The ground was rushing towards him, strewn with geometric rubble. The suit’s proximity alarm began to chime, indicating the nearness of the floor. Less than a kilometre now, though it looked close enough to touch. He felt the suit begin to adjust itself around him, remoulding itself for surface operation. One hundred metres. They were descending towards a flattish crystal slab: presumably some chunk of the ceiling which had fallen all this way. It was the size of a small ballroom. He could see the blinding glare of his suit thrusters in its marbled surface.
“Cut your thrust five seconds before impact,” Sajaki said. “We don’t want the heat to trigger a defensive reaction.”
“No,” Sylveste said. “That’s the last thing we want.”
He assumed the suit would protect him from the fall, though it took an effort of will to follow Sajaki’s instructions, slipping into freefall five seconds before his feet were due to touch the crystal. The suit bulged slightly, projecting cushioning armour plates. The density of the gel-air rose and for a moment he almost blacked out. But when the impact came, it was almost too gentle to register.
He blinked, and realised he had fallen on his back. Great, he thought—very dignified. Then the suit righted itself and popped him back on his feet.
He was standing in Cerberus.
THIRTY-FIVE
“How long now?”
“We’ve been out a day.” Sajaki’s voice sounded thin and distant, though his suit was only a few tens of metres away from Sylveste. “We still have plenty of time; don’t worry.”
“I believe you,” Sylveste said. “At least, part of me does. The other part isn’t so sure.”
“That other part might be me,” Calvin said quietly. “And no, I don’t believe we still have plenty of time. We might do, but I don’t think we should count on it. Not when we know so little.”
“If that’s meant to inspire confidence…”
“No, it wasn’t.”