‘I’ve no reason to suspect it isn’t still Resurgam.’
‘So in all the essential details, nothing has happened to compromise the mission.’
Khouri wanted to strangle the woman, except it would have been like strangling a mirage. ‘Has it occurred to you that they might have their own agenda? You know what Volyova said just before I was knocked out? She said I was the new Gunnery Officer. What do you suppose she meant by that?’
‘It explains why they were looking for military experience in your background.’
‘And what if I don’t go along with her plans?’
‘I doubt it matters to her.’ The Mademoiselle stopped her strolling, adopting an expression of seriousness from her internal compendium of facial modes. ‘They’re Ultras, you see. Ultras have access to technologies considered taboo on colony worlds.’
‘Such as?’
‘Instruments for manipulating loyalty might be among them.’
‘Well, thanks for giving me this important information well in advance.’
‘Don’t worry — I always knew there was a chance of this.’ The Mademoiselle paused and touched the side of her own head. ‘I took precautions accordingly.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘The implant I put inside you will fabricate antigens for their neural medichines. More than that, it will also broadcast subliminal reinforcement messages into your subconscious mind. Volyova’s loyalty therapies will be completely neutralised.’
‘So why bother even telling me this is going to happen?’
‘Because, dear girl, once Volyova begins the treatment, you’ll have to let her think it’s working.’
The descent took only a few minutes, the air-pressure and temperature stabilised at surface normal. The shaft which the car descended was walled in diamond, ten metres wide. Occasionally there were recesses, stash-holes for equipment or small operations shacks, or switching points where two elevators could squeeze past one another before continuing their journeys. Servitors were working the diamond, extruding it in atomic-thickness filaments from spinnerettes. The filaments zipped neatly into place under the action of protein-sized molecular machines. Looking through the glass ceiling, the faintly translucent shaft seemed to reach towards infinity.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d found this?’ Sylveste asked. ‘You must have been here for months at the very least.’
‘Let’s just say your input wasn’t critical,’ Girardieau said, and then added, ‘until now, that is.’
At the shaft’s bottom, they exited into another corridor, silver-clad, cleaner and cooler than the one they had walked through at ground level. Windows along its length offered glimpses into a disarmingly large cavern filled with geodesic scaffolding and industrial structures. Sylveste was able to freezeframe the view with his eyes, then do some image-processing and expand the captured view when he was ten paces further along the corridor. For that he offered grudging thanks to Calvin.
What he saw was enough to quicken his heartbeat.
Now they pushed through a pair of armoured doors ghosted by security entoptics, writhing snakes which seemed to hiss and spit at the group. They trooped on through into an ante-room with another set of doors at the far end, flanked by militia. Girardieau waved them aside, then turned to Sylveste. The roundness of his eyes, the Pekinese aspect of his features, suddenly made him think of a painted Japanese devil on the point of belching fire.
‘Now this,’ Girardieau said, ‘is where you either ask for your money back or stand in awed silence.’
‘Impress me,’ Sylveste said, with as much droll nonchalance as he could muster, despite his racing pulse and feverish internal excitement.
Girardieau opened the rear doors. They walked into a room half the size of the freight elevator, empty apart from a row of simple escritoires inlaid into the wall. A headset and wraparound mike lay on one of them, next to a compad displaying pencil-sketch engineering diagrams. The walls sloped outwards, the area of the ceiling greater than the floor. Combined with the huge glass windows set in three of the walls, it made Sylveste feel as if he was in the gondola of an airship, cruising under a starless night sky across an unnavigated ocean.
Girardieau killed the lights, enabling them to see what lay beyond the glass.
Floods swung from the roof of the chamber beyond, curving down towards the Amarantin object which lay below. It was emerging from one nearly sheer wall of the cave; a hemisphere of pure black, hemmed by gantries and geodesic scaffolding. Scabrous lumps of hardened magma still clung to it, yet across the large areas where the magma had been chipped away, the thing was as smooth and dark as obsidian. The underlying shape was spherical; at least four hundred metres wide, although more than half still lay entombed.
‘You know who made this?’ Girardieau said, finally whispering. He did not wait for an answer: ‘It’s older than human language, but my goddamn wedding ring has more scratches on it.’
Girardieau led the party back to the elevator shaft for the final short descent down to the operations floor of the hollowed-out chamber. The ride lasted no more than thirty seconds, but for Sylveste it seemed like a grindingly slow Homeric odyssey. The object felt like his own personal prize; as hard-won as if he had unearthed it with his own bloodied fingernails. It loomed over them now, its curved, rock-encrusted side jutting unsupported into the air. There was a faint groove scored around the object, running obliquely from one side to the other. It looked like little more than a shallow hairline fracture from where he was, but it was a metre or so wide, and probably just as deep.
Girardieau led them into the nearest chock: a concrete structure with its own inner rooms and operations levels abutting the object. Inside they took another elevator, rising up through the building into the haze of scaffolding which erupted from it. Sylveste’s stomach crawled with conflicting impulses of claustro-and agoraphobia. He felt hemmed in by the unthinkable megatonnes of rock looming hundreds of metres over his head, while simultaneously racked with vertigo as they ascended the scaffolding high up the side of the object.
Small shacks and equipment huts floated in the geodesic framework. The lift connected with one of these structures and they trooped out into a complex of rooms still abuzz with the afterhum of recently curtailed activity. All the warning signs and notices were decals or painted, the area too makeshift for entoptic generators.
They walked over a tremoring girderwork bridge which extended through a loom of scaffolding towards the black skin of the Amarantin object. They were halfway up the object’s height, level with the groove. The object no longer seemed spherical; they were too close for that. It was a single black wall blocking their progress, as vast and depthless as the view of Lascaille’s Shroud he remembered after he had travelled from Spindrift. They walked onwards, until the bridge took them into the groove.
The path immediately swung to the right. On three sides — to the left, and above and below — they were hemmed in by the eerily unmarked black substance of the artefact. They walked on a trelliswork path fixed to the underlying floor via suction pads, since the alien material was nearly frictionless. To the right was a waist-high safety railing and then several hundred metres of nothing. Every five or six metres on the inside wall was a lamp, attached via epoxy pads, and every twenty or so metres was a panel marked with cryptic symbols.
They continued along the steep incline of the groove for three or four minutes until Girardieau brought them to a halt. The place where they had arrived was a tangled nexus of power lines, lamps and communications consoles. The left-hand wall of the groove folded inwards here.