‘I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.’
‘Who was this recruit?’
‘Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him — he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.’ Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She was getting to the crux of her confession now. ‘Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane — at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.’
‘He got worse?’
‘It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.’
‘How unfortunate for the poor fellow.’
Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone — what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing — would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive — and transformed at the same time — by something inexpressibly alien?
‘I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,’ Volyova said. ‘All I know is that for Nagorny — a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us — they were too much.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I changed everything — the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.’
‘You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?’
‘I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.’ She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. ‘So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.’ She paused. ‘That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.’
‘And Sajaki’s response was?’
‘That I should discontinue the experiments, at least until we’d arrived around Yellowstone. Let Nagorny spend a few years in reefersleep, and see if that cured his psychosis. I was welcome to continue tinkering with the gunnery, but I wasn’t to put Nagorny in the seat again.’
‘Sounds like very reasonable advice to me. Which of course you disregarded.’
She nodded, paradoxically relieved that the Captain had guessed her crime, without her having to spell it out.
‘I woke a year ahead of the others,’ Volyova said. ‘To give me time to oversee the system and keep an eye on how you were doing. That was what I did for a few months, too. Until I decided to wake Nagorny as well.’
‘More experiments?’
‘Yes. Until a day ago.’ She sucked hard on the cigarette.
‘This is like drawing teeth, Ilia. What happened yesterday?’
‘Nagorny disappeared.’ There; she’d said it now. ‘He had a particularly bad episode and tried to attack me. I defended myself, but he escaped. He’s elsewhere in the ship. I have no idea where.’
The Captain pondered this for long moments. She could tell what he must be thinking. It was a big ship and there were whole regions of it through which nothing could be tracked, where sensors had stopped working. It would be even harder trying to find someone who was actively hiding.
‘You’re going to have to find him,’ the Captain said. ‘You can’t have him still at large when Sajaki and the others awaken.’
‘And then what?’
‘You’ll probably have to kill him. Do it cleanly, and you can put his body back in the reefersleep unit and then arrange for the unit to fail.’
‘Make it look like an accident, you mean?’
‘Yes.’ There was, as usual, absolutely no expression on the part of the Captain’s face she could see through the casket window. He was no more capable of altering his expression than a statue.
It was a good solution — one that, in her preoccupation with the nature of the problem, she had failed to devise herself. Until then, she had feared any confrontation with Nagorny because it might put her in the position of having to kill him. Such an outcome had seemed unacceptable — but as always, no outcome was unacceptable if you looked at it the right way.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Now — with your permission — I’m going to cool you again.’
‘You’ll be back again, won’t you? I do so enjoy our little conversations, Ilia.’
‘I wouldn’t miss them for the world,’ she said, and then told her bracelet to drop his brain temperature by fifty millikelvin; all it would take to send him to dreamless, thoughtless oblivion. Or so she hoped.
Volyova finished her cigarette in silence and then looked away from the Captain, along the dark curve of the corridor. Somewhere out there — somewhere else in the ship — Nagorny was waiting, bearing her what she knew to be the deepest of grudges. He was ill himself now; sick in the head.
Like a dog that had to be put down.
‘I think I know what it is,’ Sylveste said, when the last obstructing block of stone had been removed from the obelisk’s cladding, revealing the upper two metres of the object.
‘Well?’
‘It’s a map of the Pavonis system.’
‘Something tells me you’d already guessed that,’ Pascale said, squinting through her goggles at the complex motif, which resembled two slightly offset groups of concentric circles. Stereo-scopically merged, they fell into one group which seemed to hang some distance above the obsidian. And they were planetary orbits; no doubt of that. The sun Delta Pavonis lay at the centre, marked with the appropriate Amarantin glyph — a very human-looking five-pointed star. Then came correctly sized orbits for all the major bodies in the system, with Resurgam marked with the Amarantin symbol for world. Any doubts that this was just a coincidental arrangement of circles was banished by the carefully marked moons of the major planets.
‘I had my suspicions,’ Sylveste said. He was fatigued, but the night’s work — and the risk — had surely been worthwhile. It had taken them much longer to unearth the second metre of the obelisk than the first, and at times the storm had seemed like a squadron of banshees, only ever a moment away from inflicting shrieking death. But — as had happened before, and would certainly happen again — the storm had never quite reached the fury that Cuvier had predicted. Now the worst of it was done, and though streaks of dust were still rippling in the sky like dark banners, pink dawnlight was beginning to chase away the night. It seemed they had survived after all.
‘But it doesn’t change anything,’ Pascale said. ‘We always knew they had astronomy; this just shows that at some point they discovered the heliocentric universe.’
‘It means more than that,’ Sylveste said, carefully. ‘Not all of these planets are visible to the naked eye, even allowing for Amarantin physiology.’
‘So they used telescopes.’
‘Not long ago you described them as stone-age aliens. Now you’re ready to accept that they knew how to make telescopes?’
He thought she might have smiled, but it was hard to tell when she wore the breather mask. Instead, she looked skywards. Something had crossed between the baulks; a bright deltoid moving under the dust.
‘I think someone’s here,’ she said.