Not that Girardieau and he had even been enemies, at the end.
Finally, they came to a wide, flat-bottomed throat where a number of tunnels converged. There was room to sit down, and the air was fresh and breezy; pumped air currents reached this far. In infrared, Sylveste watched Pascale slump cautiously down, hands scrabbling the frictionless floor for rats, sharp stones or grinning skulls.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’re safe here.’ As if by the very act of saying as much, he made it more likely. ‘If anyone comes, we can pick our escape routes. We’ll lie low and see what happens.’
Of course, now that the immediate flight was over, she would begin thinking about her father again. He did not want that; not now.
‘Stupid dumb Janequin,’ he said, hoping to steer her thoughts at least tangentially away from what had happened. ‘They must have blackmailed him. Isn’t that the way it always happens?’
‘What?’ Pascale asked labouredly. ‘Isn’t that the way what always happens?’
‘The pure becomes corrupted.’ His voice was so low it threatened to crack into a whisper. The gas used in the auditorium attack had not properly reached his lungs, but he could still feel its effect on his larynx. ‘Janequin was working on those birds for years; all the time I knew him in Mantell. They started as innocent living sculptures. He said any colony orbiting a star named Pavonis ought to have a few peacocks around the place. Then someone thought of a better use for them.’
‘Perhaps they were all poisonous,’ Pascale said, stretching the final word into a long slither of sibilant esses. ‘Primed like little walking bombs.’
‘Somehow I doubt he tampered with more than a few of them.’ Maybe it was the air, but Sylveste felt suddenly weary, needful of immediate sleep. He knew they were safe for now. If the killers had been following them — and the killers might not even realise they were not among the dead — they would have reached this part of the shell already.
‘I never believed he had real enemies,’ Pascale said, her sentence seeming to writhe unattached in the confined space. He imagined her fear: without vision, with only his assurances, this dark place must be exquisitely frightening. ‘I never thought anyone would kill him for what they wanted. I didn’t think anything was worth that much.’
Along with the rest of the crew, Khouri would eventually enter reefersleep for the bulk of the time that the ship took to reach Resurgam. But before then she spent much of her waking time in the gunnery, being subjected to endless simulations.
After a while it began to invade her dreams, to the point where boredom was no longer an adequate term to encompass the repetitiousness of the exercises Volyova had conceived for her. Yet losing herself in the gunnery environment was something she began to welcome, since it offered temporary respite from her worries. In the gunnery, the whole Sylveste problem became a small anxious itch, nothing more. She remained aware that she was in an impossible situation, but that fact no longer seemed critical. The gunnery was all, and that was why she no longer feared it. She was still herself after the sessions, and she began to think that the gunnery hardly mattered at all; that it would not ultimately make any difference to the outcome of her mission.
All that changed when the dogs came home.
They were the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds: cybernetic agents she had unleashed into the gunnery during one of Khouri’s sessions. The dogs had clawed their way into the system itself via the neural interface, exploiting the system’s one forgivable weakness. Volyova had hardened it against software attack, but had obviously never imagined that the attack might come from the brain of the person hooked into the gunnery. The dogs barked back safe assurances that they had entered the gunnery’s core. They had not returned to Khouri during the session in which they were unleashed, since it would take more than a few hours for them to sniff every nook and cranny of the gunnery’s Byzantine architecture. So they had stayed in the system for more than a day, until Volyova once again hooked Khouri in.
Then the dogs returned to the Mademoiselle, and she decrypted them and unravelled the prey they had located.
‘She has a stowaway,’ the Mademoiselle said when she and Khouri were alone after a session. ‘Something has hidden itself in the gunnery system, and I’m prepared to bet she knows nothing about it at all.’
Which was when Khouri stopped regarding the gunnery chamber with such total equanimity. ‘Go on,’ she said, feeling her body temperature plummet.
‘A data entity; that’s as well as I can describe it.’
‘Something the dogs encountered?’
‘Yes, but…’ Once again the Mademoiselle sounded lost for words. Occasionally Khouri suspected it was genuine: the implant was having to deal with a situation light-years away from anything in the real Mademoiselle’s expectations. ‘It’s not that they saw it, or even saw a part of it. It’s too subtle for that, or else Volyova’s own counter-intrusion systems would have caught it. It’s more that they sensed the absences where it had just been; sensed the breeze it stirred when it moved around.’
‘Do me a favour,’ Khouri said. ‘Try not to make it sound so damned scary, will you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the Mademoiselle answered. ‘But I can’t deny that the thing’s presence is disturbing.’
‘Disturbing to you? How do you think I feel?’ Khouri shook her head, stunned at the casual viciousness of reality. ‘All right; what do you think it is? Some kind of virus, like all the others which are eating away this ship?’
‘The thing seems much too advanced for that. Volyova’s own defences have kept the ship operational despite the other viral entities, and she’s even kept the Melding Plague at bay. But this…’ The Mademoiselle looked at Khouri with a convincing facsimile of fear. ‘The dogs were frightened by it, Khouri. In the way it evaded them, it revealed itself to be much cleverer than almost anything in my experience. But it didn’t attack them, and that troubles me even more.’
‘Yes?’
‘Because it suggests that the thing is biding its time.’
Sylveste never found out how long they had slept. It might only have been minutes, packed with fevered, adrenalin-charged dreams of chaos and flight, or it might have been hours, or even a whole portion of the day. No way of knowing. Whatever the case, it had not been natural fatigue that sent them under. Roused by something, Sylveste realised with a stunned jolt that they had been breathing sleeping gas, pumped into the tunnel system. No wonder the air had seemed so fragrant and breezy.
There was a sound like rats in the attic.
He pawed Pascale awake; she came to consciousness with a plaintive moan, assimilating her surroundings and predicament in a few troubled seconds of reality-denial. He studied the heat-signature of her face, watching waxy neutrality cave in to an expressive mélange of remorse and fear.
‘We have to move,’ Sylveste said. ‘They’re after us — they gassed the tunnels.’
The scrabbling sound grew closer by the second. Pascale was still somewhere between wakefulness and dream, but she managed to open her mouth — it sounded as if she were speaking through cotton wool — and ask him, ‘Which way?’
‘This way,’ Sylveste said, grabbing her and propelling her forwards, down the nearest valvelike opening. She stumbled on the slipperiness. Sylveste helped her up, squeezed beyond her and took her hand. Gloom lay ahead, his eyes revealing only a few metres of the tunnel beyond their position. He was, he realised, only slightly less blind than his wife.