Volyova was first out of her seat restraints. ‘Shall we step aboard?’ she asked, with something that was not quite the politeness Khouri had been expecting.
They propelled themselves through the shuttle and out into the spacious environment of the ship. They were still in free-fall, but at the end of the corridor they were facing Khouri could see a complex arrangement where the stationary and rotating sections were joined together.
She was beginning to feel nauseous, but she was damned if she was going to let Volyova see this.
‘Before we go ahead,’ the Ultra woman said, ‘there’s someone you have to meet.’
She was looking over Khouri’s shoulder, back towards the corridor that led to the shuttle which had brought them aboard. Khouri heard the shuffling sound of someone working hand-over-hand along the rails which ribbed the passage. But that could only mean that there had been another person aboard the shuttle.
Something was wrong here.
Volyova’s attitude was not that of someone who was trying to impress a potential recruit. It was more as if she cared little what Khouri thought; as if it was of no consequence at all. Khouri looked around, in time to see the Komuso who had come with them in the elevator. His face was lost under the expressionless wicker helmet they all wore. He carried his shakuhachi in the crook of his arm.
Khouri started to speak, but Volyova silenced her. ‘Welcome aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Ana Khouri. You’ve just become our new Gunnery Officer.’ Then she nodded towards the Komuso. ‘Do me a favour, will you, Triumvir?’
‘Anything particular?’
‘Knock her out before she tries to kill either one of us.’
The last thing Khouri saw was a golden blur of bamboo.
Sylveste thought he smelt Pascale’s perfume before his eyes separated her from the crowd outside the prison building. He made a reflex move towards her, but the two burly militiamen who had escorted him from his room quickly restrained him. Catcalls and muffled insults came from the cordoned-off crowd, but Sylveste barely noticed them.
Pascale kissed him diplomatically, half hiding the conjunction of their mouths behind her lace-gloved hand.
‘Before you ask,’ she said, her voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd, ‘I have no more idea what this is about than you.’
‘Is Nils behind it?’
‘Who else? Only he’s got the clout to get you out of that place for more than a day.’
‘Pity he’s not so keen to prevent me returning.’
‘Oh, he might — if he didn’t have to placate his own people, and the opposition. It’s about time you stopped thinking of him as your worst enemy, you know.’ They stepped into the sterile hush of the waiting car. The vehicle was adapted from one of the smaller surface exploration buggies, four balloon wheels at the extremities of its air-smoothed body, comms gear stowed in a matt-black hump on the roof. It was painted Inundationist purple, with Hokusai wave pendants mounted on the front.
‘If it wasn’t for my father,’ Pascale continued, ‘you’d have died during the coup. He protected you from your worst enemies.’
‘That doesn’t make him a very competent revolutionary.’
‘And what does that say about the regime he managed to overthrow?’
Sylveste shrugged. ‘Fair point, I suppose.’
A guard climbed into the front seat, behind a partition of armoured glass, and then they were moving, rushing through the crowd, speeding towards the edge of the city. They passed through one of the arboreta, then descended down one of the ramps which passed beneath the perimeter. Two other government cars accompanied them, also modified from surface buggies, but painted black and with masked militia riding postilion, holding rifles to their shoulders. After travelling for a kilometre along an unlit tunnel, the convoy arrived in an airlock and halted while the breathable city air was exchanged for Resurgam’s atmosphere. The guards remained at their posts, pausing only to adjust their breather masks and goggles. Then the vehicles moved on, ascending back towards the surface. They arrived in greyish daylight, surrounded by concrete blast walls, driving across a surface patterned in red and green lights.
An aircraft was waiting for them, parked on the apron on a tripod of skids, the undersides of its wings already uncomfortably bright to look at, already beginning to ionise the boundary layer of air below them. The driver reached into a dashboard compartment and removed breather masks, passing them back through the security grill, motioning for them to place them over their faces.
‘Not that you have to,’ he said. ‘Oxygen’s up two hundred per cent since you were last outside Resurgam City, Doctor Sylveste. Some people have breathed naked atmosphere for tens of minutes with no longterm effects.’
‘Those must be the dissidents I keep hearing about,’ Sylveste said. ‘The renegades Girardieau betrayed during the coup. The ones that are supposed to be communicating with True Path’s leaders in Cuvier. I don’t envy them. The dust must clog their lungs almost as much as it clogs their minds.’
The escort looked unimpressed. ‘Scavenger enzymes process the dust particles. It’s old Martian biotech. Anyway; dust levels are down. All the moisture we pumped into the atmosphere allowed the dust particles to bind into bigger grains which aren’t so easily transported by the wind.’
‘Very good,’ Sylveste applauded. ‘Pity it’s still such a miserable hellhole.’
He palmed the mask to his face and waited for the door to open. A moderate wind was blowing, no more than a stinging abrasion.
They dashed across the ground.
The aircraft was a welcome oasis of space and quiet, its sumptuous interior outfitted in governmental purple. The occupants of the other two cars boarded by a different door, Sylveste catching a glimpse of Nils Girardieau crossing the apron. Girardieau walked with a swaying motion that began somewhere near his shoulders, like a pair of architect’s dividers being walked across a drawing board point to point. There was a momentum to him, like a glacier compressed into a man’s volume. The leader vanished out of sight and then a few minutes later the visible edge of the closest wing turned violet, enveloped in a nimbus of excited ions, and the aircraft climbed from the apron.
Sylveste sketched a window for himself and watched Cuvier — or Resurgam City, as they now called it — grow small beneath him. It was the first time he had seen the place in its entirety since the coup, back before the statue of the French naturalist had been toppled. The old simplicity of the colony was gone. A froth of human habitation extended messily beyond the dome perimeters; air-sealed structures linked by covered roads and walkways. There were many smaller outlying domes, emerald-green with plantations. Even a few undomed strips of trial organisms laid out in eye-hurting geometric patterns, waiting to be unleashed far beyond the city.
They circled the city and then took off on a northerly course. Lacework canyons furled below. Occasionally they overflew a small settlement, usually just an opaque dome or streamlined shack, the glare from the wings momentarily illuminating whatever they overflew. Mostly it was wilderness, uncrossed by road, pipe or power line.
Sylveste catnapped intermittently, waking to see tropical deserts of ice and imported tundra washing below. Presently a settlement came over the horizon and the aircraft made loitering spirals towards the ground. Sylveste moved his window to get a better look.