That was indeed odd, though understandable if one assumed they were now desperate to recruit anyone who came forward. It said little for their honesty, of course, but then again, it saved Khouri using a cover story. It was, she decided, nothing to worry about. It would, in fact, all have been roses, were it not for what the Mademoiselle had placed in her head while she was sleeping. The implant was tiny and would not elicit suspicion from the Ultras, designed to resemble — and function as — a standard entoptic splice. If they got too inquisitive and removed the damn thing, all its incriminating parts would self-erase or reorganise. But that was not the point. Khouri’s objection to the implant was not on the grounds that it was risky or unnecessary, but rather that the last person she wanted in her head on a daily basis was the Mademoiselle. Of course, it was just a beta-level simulation constructed to mimic her personality, projecting an image of the Mademoiselle into Khouri’s visual field and tickling her aural centre to allow her to hear what the ghost said. No one else would be privy to the woman’s apparitions, and Khouri would be able to communicate silently with her.
‘Call it need to know,’ the ghost had said. ‘As an ex-soldier, I’m certain you understand this principle.’
‘Yes, I understand it,’ Khouri said with sullen acceptance. ‘And it stinks, but I don’t suppose you’re about to take the damned thing out of my head just because I don’t like it.’
The Mademoiselle smiled. ‘To burden you with too much knowledge at this point would be to risk a momentary indiscretion in the presence of the Ultras.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Khouri said. ‘I already know you want me to kill Sylveste. What more could there possibly be to find out?’
The Mademoiselle repeated her smile, maddeningly. Like many beta-level sims, her compendium of facial expressions was small enough to make repetition inevitable, like a bad actor constantly falling into the same characterisations.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that what you now know is not even a fragment of the whole story. Not even a splinter.’
When Pascale arrived, Sylveste made a point of studying her face, matching it against his memories of Nils Girardieau. As usual he rammed against the limitations of his vision. His eyes were poor at curves, tending to approximate the nuances of the human face as a series of stepped edges.
But what Calvin had said was not obviously untrue. Pascale’s hair was Bible-black and straight; Girardieau’s curly and red. But the bone structure had too many points of similarity for coincidence. If Calvin had not made the remark, perhaps Sylveste would never have guessed… but now that the idea was there, it explained far too much.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ he said.
She seemed genuinely taken aback. ‘About what?’
‘Everything. Starting with your father.’
‘My father?’ She was quiet now. ‘Ah. Then you know.’
He nodded, tight-lipped. Then, ‘That was one of the risks you ran by collaborating with Calvin. Calvin is very clever.’
‘He must have established some kind of data link with my compad; accessed private files. The bastard.’
‘Now you know how I feel. Why did you do it, Pascale?’
‘At first, because I had no choice. I wanted to study you. And the only way I could earn your trust was under another name. It was possible; few people even knew I existed, much less what I looked like.’ She paused. ‘And it worked, didn’t it? You did trust me. And I did nothing to betray that trust.’
‘Is that the truth? You never told Nils anything that might have helped him?’
She looked wounded. ‘You had forewarning of the coup, remember? If anyone was betrayed in all this, it was my father.’
He tried to find an angle that would prove her wrong, without really being sure he wanted to. Perhaps what she said was true. ‘And the biography?’
‘That was my father’s idea.’
‘A tool to discredit me?’
‘There’s nothing in the biography which isn’t truthful — unless you know otherwise.’ She paused. ‘It’s nearly ready for release, actually. Calvin’s been very helpful. It’ll be the first major work of indigenous art produced on Resurgam, do you realise? Since the Amarantin, of course.’
‘It’s a piece of art all right. Are you going to release it under your real name?’
‘That was always the idea. I was hoping you wouldn’t find out until then, of course.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. None of this will change our working relationship, believe me. After all, I always knew Nils was the real author behind it.’
‘That makes it easier for you, doesn’t? To write me off as an irrelevance?’
‘Do you have the TE dates you promised me?’
‘Yes.’ She passed a card to him. ‘I don’t break my promises, Doctor. But I’m afraid the little respect I have for you is in serious danger of vanishing altogether.’
Sylveste glanced at the trapped-electron summary scrolling down the card as he flexed it between thumb and forefinger. Some part of his mind was entirely unable to detach itself from what the numbers represented, even as he spoke to Pascale. ‘When your father told me about the biography, he said the woman who would be authoring it was someone whose illusions were on the point of being shattered.’
She stood up. ‘I think we should leave this until another time.’
‘No; wait.’ Sylveste reached out and held her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I need to talk to you about this, do you understand?’
She flinched at the contact, then slowly relaxed. Her expression was still watchful. ‘About what?’
‘This.’ He tapped his thumb against the TE summary. ‘It’s very interesting.’
Volyova’s shuttle was approaching a shipyard; up near the Lagrange point between Yellowstone and its moon, Marco’s Eye. About a dozen lighthuggers were parked in the yard; more ships than Khouri had ever seen in her life. At the yard’s hub was a major carousel, smaller in-system vessels attached to the wheel’s rim like suckling pigs. A few of the lighthuggers were encased in skeletal support structures for major ice-shield or Conjoiner-drive overhauls (Conjoiner ships were here, too: sleek and black, as if chiselled from space itself); but the rest of the starships were basically drifting, following lazy and slow orbits around the Lagrange point’s centre of gravity. Khouri guessed that there must be complex rules of etiquette governing the way those ships were parked; who had to move out the way of whom to avoid a collision which a computer might predict days in advance. The expenditure of fuel which might have to be burned to nudge a ship off a collision course would be tiny against the profit margin of a typical trade stopover… but the loss of face would be much harder to amortise. There had never been as many ships as this parked around Sky’s Edge, but even then she had heard of skirmishes between crews over issues of parking priority and trade rights. It was a common groundsider’s misapprehension that Ultras were a homogeneous splinter of humanity. In truth, they were as factional, and as paranoid about one another, as any other human strain.
Now they were approaching Volyova’s ship.
The thing, like all the other lighthuggers, was improbably streamlined. Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed — which was where these ships spent most of their time — it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt. The ship was sheathed in ice, so glisteningly pure that it looked like diamond. The shuttle swooped in low over Volyova’s ship, and for a moment Khouri apprehended the ship’s vastness. It was like flying over a city, not another vessel. Then a door irised open in the hull, revealing a glowing docking bay. Volyova guided the shuttle home with expert taps on her thruster controls, latching onto a berthing cradle. Khouri heard thumps as umbilicals and docking connectors thudded home.