Manoukhian went off on a boast. Khouri brushed her fingers against one of the sculptures, feeling its cool metal texture. The edges were very sharp. It was as if she and Manoukhian were two furtive art lovers who had broken into a museum in the middle of the night. The sculptures seemed to be biding their time. They were waiting for something — but not with infinite reserves of patience.
She was perplexingly glad of the gunman’s company.
‘Did she make these?’ Khouri asked, interrupting Manoukhian’s flow.
‘Perhaps,’ Manoukhian said. ‘In which case you could say she suffered for her art.’ He stopped, touching her on the shoulder. ‘All right. You see those stairs?’
‘I guess you want me to use them.’
‘You’re learning.’
Gently, he stuck the gun in her back — just to remind her it was still there.
Through a porthole in the wall next to the dead man’s quarters Volyova could see a tangerine-coloured gas giant planet, its shadowed southern pole flickering with auroral storms. They were deep inside the Epsilon Eridani system now; coming in at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Yellowstone was only a few days away; already they were within light-minutes of local traffic, threading through the web of line-of-sight communications which linked every significant habitat or spacecraft in the system. Their own ship had changed, too. Through the same window Volyova could just see the front of one of the Conjoiner engines. The engines had automatically hauled in their scoop fields as the ship dropped below ramming speed, subtly altering their shapes to in-system mode, the intake maw closing like a flower at dusk. Somehow the engines were still producing thrust, but the source of the reaction mass or the energy to accelerate it was just another mystery of Conjoiner technology. Presumably there was a limit on how long the drives could function like this, or else they would never have needed to trawl space for fuel during interstellar cruise mode…
Her mind was wandering, trying to focus on anything but the issue at hand.
‘I think she’s going to be trouble,’ Volyova said. ‘Serious trouble.’
‘Not if I read her correctly.’ Triumvir Sajaki dispensed a smile.
‘Sudjic knows me too well. She knows I wouldn’t take the trouble of actually reprimanding her if she made a move against a member of the Triumvirate. I wouldn’t even give her the luxury of leaving the ship when we get to Yellowstone. I’d simply kill her.’
‘That might be a little harsh.’
She sounded weak and despised herself for it, but it was how she felt. ‘It’s not as if I don’t sympathise with her. After all Sudjic had nothing personal against me until I… until Nagorny died. If she does anything, couldn’t you just discipline her?’
‘It’s not worth it,’ Sajaki said. ‘If she has the mind to do something to you, she won’t stop at petty aggravation. If I just discipline her she’ll find a way to hurt you permanently. Killing her would be the only reasonable option. Anyway — I’m surprised that you see her side of things. Hasn’t it occurred to you that some of Nagorny’s problems might have rubbed off on her?’
‘You’re asking me whether I think she’s completely sane?’
‘It doesn’t matter. She won’t move against you — you have my word on that.’ Sajaki paused. ‘Now, can we get this over with? I’ve had enough of Nagorny for one life.’
‘I know exactly how you feel.’
It was several days after her first meeting with the crew. They were standing outside the dead man’s quarters, on level 821, preparing to enter his rooms. They had remained sealed since his death — longer, as far as the others were concerned. Even Volyova had not entered them, wary of disturbing something which might place her there.
She spoke into her bracelet. ‘Disable security interdict, personal quarters Gunnery Officer Boris Nagorny, authorisation Volyova.’
The door opened before them, emitting a palpable draught of highly chilled air.
‘Send them in,’ Sajaki said.
The armed servitors took only a few minutes to sweep the interior, certifying that there were no obvious hazards. It would have been unlikely, of course, since Nagorny had probably not planned to die quite when Volyova had arranged it. But with characters like him, one could never be sure.
They stepped in, the servitors having already activated the room lights.
Like most of the psychopaths she had encountered, Nagorny had always seemed perfectly happy with the smallest of personal spaces. His quarters were even more determinedly cramped than her own. A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse. Most of his belongings — there were not many — had been securely racked down, and so had not been disturbed by the ship’s manoeuvres when she killed him.
Sajaki grimaced and held a sleeve up to his nose. ‘That smell.’
‘It’s borscht. Beetroot. I think Nagorny was partial to it.’
‘Remind me not to try it.’
Sajaki closed the door behind them.
There was a residual frigidity to the air. The thermometers said that it was now room temperature, but it seemed as if the molecules in the air carried an imprint of the months of cold. The room’s overpowering spartanness did not offset this chill. Volyova’s quarters seemed opulent and luxurious by comparison. It was not simply a case of Nagorny neglecting to personalise his space. It was just that in so doing he had so miserably failed by normal standards that his efforts actually contradicted themselves and made the room seem even bleaker than had it been empty.
What failed to help matters was the coffin.
The elongated object had been the only thing in the room not lashed down when she killed Nagorny. It was still intact, but Volyova sensed that the thing had once stood upright, dominating the room with a fearful premonitory grandeur. It was huge and probably made of iron. The metal was as ebon and light-sucking as the surface of a Shrouder emboîtement. All its surfaces had been carved in bas-relief, too intricately rendered to give up all their secrets in one glance. Volyova stared in silence. Are you trying to say, she thought, that Boris Nagorny was capable of this?
‘Yuuji,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘I don’t very much blame you.’
‘What kind of madman makes his own coffin?’
‘A very dedicated one, I’d say. But it’s here, and it’s probably the only glimpse into his mind we have. What do you make of the embellishments?’
‘Undoubtedly a projection of his psychosis, a concretisation.’ Now that Sajaki was forcing calm she was slipping into subservience. ‘I should study the imagery. It might give me insight.’ She paused, added: ‘So that we don’t make the same mistake twice, I mean.’
‘Prudent,’ Sajaki said, kneeling down. He stroked his gloved forefinger over the intagliated rococo surface. ‘We were very lucky you were not forced to kill him, in the end.’
‘Yes,’ she said, giving him an odd look. ‘But what are your thoughts on the embellishments, Yuuji-san?’
‘I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,’ he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?’
‘I haven’t the faintest.’
‘Let me hazard a guess, anyway. I’d say that in Nagorny’s imagination Sun Stealer represented somebody in his day-to-day experience, and I see two obvious possibilities.’
‘Himself or me,’ Volyova said, knowing that Sajaki was not to be easily distracted. ‘Yes, yes, that much is obvious… but this doesn’t in any way help us.’
‘You’re quite sure he never mentioned this Sun Stealer?’