Revelation Space

ELEVEN

They were running down a curving corridor, one that led from the glade towards the nearest radial elevator shaft.

“What do you mean?” Khouri shouted, straining to be heard above the klaxon. “What do you mean it’s arming itself?”

Volyova wasted no breath replying, not until they had reached the waiting elevator car, and she had ordered the thing to shuttle them straight to the nearest spinal-trunk elevator shaft, ignoring all the usual acceleration limits. When the car began to move she and Khouri were rammed back into its glass walling, almost knocking what wind they had left from their chests. The car’s interior lights were pulsing red; Volyova could feel her heart starting to pulse in sympathy. But somehow she managed to talk.

“Exactly what I said. There are systems monitoring each cache-weapon—and one has just detected a power-surge in its weapon.”

Volyova did not add that the reason she had installed those monitors in the first place was because of the weapon which had appeared to move. Ever since, she had clung to the hope that the move had been imagined—a hallucination brought on by the loneliness of her vigil—but she now knew that it had been nothing of the sort.

“How can it arm itself?”

The question was perfectly reasonable. It was one for which Volyova had a decided absence of glib answers.

“I’m just hoping the glitch is in the monitoring systems,” she said, if only to be saying something. “Not the weapon itself.”

“Why would it be arming itself?”

“I don’t know! Haven’t you noticed I’m not exactly taking this calmly?”

The axial lift decelerated abruptly, transitioning to the trunk shaft with a series of nauseous lurches. Then they were dropping quickly, so fast that their apparent weight dwindled almost to nothing.

“Where are we going?”

“The cache chamber, of course.” Volyova glared at the recruit. “I don’t know what’s going on, Khouri, but whatever it is, I want visual confirmation. I want to see what the damned things are actually doing.”

“It arms itself, what else can it do?”

“I don’t know,” Volyova said, as calmly as possible. “I’ve tried all the shutdown protocols—nothing worked. This isn’t exactly a situation I anticipated.”

“But surely it can’t deploy? It can’t actually find a target and go off?”

Volyova glanced down at her bracelet. Maybe the readings were going haywire; maybe there really had been a glitch in the watchdog systems. She hoped that was the case, because what the bracelet was telling her now was very bad news indeed.

The cache-weapon was moving.

Falkender was true to his word: the operations he performed on Sylveste’s eyes were seldom pleasant and frequently much worse, with occasional forays into absolute agony. For days now Sluka’s surgeon had been exploring the envelope of his skill, promising to restore such basic human functions as colour perception and the ability to sense depth and smooth movement, but not quite convincing Sylveste that he had the means or the expertise to do so. Sylveste had told Falkender that the eyes had never been perfect in the first place; Calvin’s tools had been too limited for that. But even the crude vision which Calvin had given him would have been preferable to the insipidly coloured, flicker-motion parody of the world through which he now moved. Not for the first time, Sylveste found himself doubting that the discomfort of the repair was likely to be justified by the results.

“I think you should give up,” he said.

“I fixed Sluka,” Falkender said, a lividly coloured laminate of flat, man-shaped apertures dancing into Sylveste’s visual field. “You’re no great challenge.”

“So what if you restore my vision? I can’t see my wife because Sluka won’t let us be together. And a cell wall’s a cell wall, no matter how clearly you see it.” He stopped as waves of pain lashed his temples. “Matter of fact, I’m not sure it isn’t better being blind. At least that way you don’t have reality rammed down your optic nerve every time you open your eyes.”

“You don’t have eyes, Doctor Sylveste.” Falkender twisted something, sending pink pain-rosettes into his vision. “So stop feeling sorry for yourself, please; it’s most unbecoming. Besides, it’s possible you won’t have to stare at these particular walls for very much longer.”

Sylveste perked up.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning things may soon start moving, if what I’ve heard is halfway to the truth.”

“Very informative.”

“I’ve heard that we may soon have visitors,” Falkender said, punctuating his remark with another stab of pain.

“Stop being cryptic. When you say ‘we’, which faction do you mean? And what kind of visitors?”

“All I’ve heard is rumour, Doctor Sylveste. I’m sure Sluka will tell you in good time.”

“Don’t count on it,” Sylveste said, who happened to be under no illusions as to his usefulness from Sluka’s point of view. Since the time of his arrival in Mantell he had come to the forcible conclusion that Sluka was retaining him only because he offered her some transient entertainment; that he was some fabulous captured beast of dubious use but undoubted novelty. It was not at all clear that she would ever confide in him regarding any matter of true seriousness—and even if she did, it would be for only one of two reasons: either because she wanted something other than a wall to talk to, or because she had devised some new means of tormenting him verbally. More than once she had spoken of putting him to sleep until she thought of a use for him. “I was right to capture you,” she would say. “And I’m not saying you don’t have your uses—they’re just not immediately apparent to me. But I don’t see why anyone else should be allowed to exploit you.” From that point of view, as Sylveste had soon realised, it mattered little to Sluka whether or not she kept him alive. Alive, he provided her with some amusement—and there was always the possibility he might become more useful to her in the future, as the colony’s balance of power shifted. But, equally, it would not greatly inconvenience her to have him killed now. At least that way he would never become a liability; could never turn against her.

Eventually there came an end to the tenderly administered agonies, a passage into calmer light and almost plausible colours. Sylveste held his own hand before his gaze and turned it slowly, absorbing its solidity. There were furrows and traceries embossed into his skin which he had almost forgotten, yet it could not be more than tens of days—a few weeks—since he had been blinded in the Amarantin tunnel system.

“Good as new,” Falkender said, placing his tools back into their wooden autoclave. The strange, ciliated glove went last of all; as Falkender peeled it from his womanly fingers, it twitched and spasmed like a beached jellyfish.

“Get some illumination here,” Volyova said into her bracelet as the elevator entered the cache chamber.

Weight rushed back as the box slowed to a halt. Immediately they had to squint as the chamber lights glared on, shining on the enormous, cradled shapes of the weapons.

“Where is it?” Khouri asked.

“Wait,” Volyova said. “I have to get my orientation.”

“I don’t see anything moving.”

“Me neither… yet.”

Volyova was squashed flat against the glass side of the elevator, straining to peer around the corner of the weapon which bulked largest. Swearing, she made the elevator descend another twenty, thirty metres, then found the order which killed the pulsing red lighting and the interior klaxon.

“Look,” Khouri said, in the relative calm which followed. “Is that something moving?”

“Where?”

She pointed, almost vertically downwards. Volyova squinted after her, then spoke into the bracelet again. “Auxiliary lighting—cache chamber quadrant five. “Then to Khouri: “Let’s see what the svinoi’s up to.”

“You weren’t really serious, were you?”

“About what?”

“A glitch in the monitoring systems.”

“Not really,” Volyova said, squinting even more as the auxiliaries came online, spotlighting a portion of the chamber far beneath their feet. “It’s called optimism—but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”

The weapon, Volyova said, was one of the planet-killers. She was not really sure how it functioned; still less exactly what it was capable of doing. But she had her suspicions. She had tested it years ago at the very lowest range of its destructive settings… against a small moon. Extrapolating—and she was very good at extrapolating—the weapon would have no trouble dismantling a planet even at a range of hundreds of AU. There were things inside it which had the gravitational signatures of quantum black holes, yet which, strangely, refused to evaporate. Somehow the weapon created a soliton—a standing-wave—in the geodesic structure of spacetime.

And now the weapon had come alive, without her bidding. It was gliding through the chamber, riding the network of tracks which would eventually deliver it to open space. It was like watching a skyscraper crawl through a city.

“Can we do anything?”

“I’m open to suggestions. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, you have to appreciate I haven’t given this a hell of a lot of thought…”

“Say it, Khouri.”

“We could try blocking it.” Khouri’s forehead was furrowed, as if, on top of all this, she was battling with a sudden migraine attack. “You’ve got shuttles on this thing, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then use one to block the exit. Or is that too crude for you?”

“Right now, the expression ‘too crude’ isn’t in my vocabulary.”

Volyova glanced at her bracelet. All the while the weapon was moving down the chamber wall, for all the world like an armoured slug retracing its own slime-trail. At the bottom of the chamber a vast iris was opening; the track led through the aperture into the dark chamber nested below this one. The weapon was almost level with the aperture.

“I can move one of the shuttles… but it’ll take too long to get it outside the ship. I don’t think we’d get there in time…”

“Do it!” Khouri said, every muscle in her face screaming tension. “Piss around any more and we won’t even have this option!”

Volyova nodded, regarding the recruit suspiciously. What did Khouri know about all this? She seemed less bewildered than Volyova, although she also looked far more agitated than Volyova would have expected. But she had a point; the shuttle idea was worth a try, even though it was unlikely to succeed.

“We need something else,” she said, calling up the shuttle-control subpersona.

The weapon was halfway through the transfer iris, sliding into second chamber.

“Something else?”

“In case this doesn’t work. The problem’s in the gunnery, Khouri—and maybe that’s where we should attack it.”

She blanched. “What?”

“I want you in the seat.”

While they dropped towards the gunnery, accelerating so hard that the floor inverted to become the ceiling—and Khouri’s stomach felt like it had done something similar—Volyova whispered frantic, breathless instructions into her bracelet. It took a maddening few seconds to access the right subpersona, another few to bypass the safeguards which prevented unauthorised remote control of the shuttles. Still more to warm up the engines of one of the shuttles, and then longer still while the machine declamped from the docking restraints and vectored out of its holding bay, beyond the hull, handling—Volyova said—like the damn thing was still half asleep. The lighthugger was still under thrust, so the manoeuvre was doubly tricky.

“What worries me,” Khouri said, “is what the weapon plans to do once it gets outside. Are we in range of anything?”

“Resurgam, conceivably.” Volyova raised her eyes from the bracelet. “But maybe now it won’t get a chance.”

The Mademoiselle chose that moment to blink into existence, somehow managing to accommodate herself within the elevator without intruding on the volume already claimed by Khouri and the Triumvir. “She’s wrong. This isn’t going to work. I control more than just the cache-weapon.”

“Admitting it now, are you?”

“What’s to deny?” The Mademoiselle smiled pridefully. “You recall that I downloaded an avatar of myself into the gunnery? Well my avatar now controls the cache. Nothing I can do can influence her actions. She’s as far beyond my reach as I am beyond the reach of my original self on Yellowstone.”

The elevator was slowing now, Volyova engrossed by the complex little readouts patterning her bracelet. A schematic holo showed the shuttle moving along the lighthugger’s hull; a tiny remora nosing along the smooth flank of a basking shark.

“But you gave her orders,” Khouri said. “You know what the hell she’s up to, don’t you.”

“Oh, her orders were very simple. If control of the gunnery placed at her disposal any systems which could quicken the completion of the mission, she was to make whatever arrangements were necessary to hasten that end.”

Khouri shook her head in abject disbelief.

“I thought you wanted me to kill Sylveste.”

“The weapon may now make that end achievable rather sooner than I anticipated.”

“No,” Khouri said, after the Mademoiselle’s remark had had time to settle in. “You wouldn’t wipe out a planet just to kill one man.”

“Discovered a conscience all of a sudden, have we?” The Mademoiselle shook her head, lips pursed. “You exhibited no qualms over Sylveste. Why should the deaths of others trouble you so much? Or is it simply a question of scale?”

“It’s just…” Khouri hesitated, knowing what she was about to say would not trouble the Mademoiselle. “Inhuman. But I don’t expect you to understand that.”

The elevator halted, door opening to reveal the semi-flooded access way which led to the gunnery. Khouri took a moment to get her bearings. Ever since the descent had begun, she had been suffering the worst headache imaginable. It seemed to be lessening now, but she had no wish to dwell on what might have caused it.

“Quickly,” Volyova said, traipsing out.

“What you don’t understand,” the Mademoiselle said, “is why I would go to the trouble of destroying an entire colony just to ensure one man’s death.”

Khouri followed Volyova, boots disappearing to the knees in the flood.

“Damn right I don’t. And I’d try and stop you whether I did or not.”

“Not if you grasped the facts, Khouri. You’d actually be urging me on.”

“Then it’s your fault for not telling me.”

They pushed through bulkhead seals, dead janitor-rats bobbing by as the water levels equalised, loosened from the little crannies where they had curled up to expire.

“Where’s the shuttle?” Khouri called.

“Parked over the space-door,” Volyova said, turning back to look Khouri in the eye. “And the weapon hasn’t emerged yet.”

“Does that mean we won?”

“Means we haven’t lost yet. But I still want you in the gunnery.”

The Mademoiselle had gone now, but her disembodied voice lingered, wrongly echoless in the cramped corridor.

“It won’t do you any good. There’s no system in the gunnery that I can’t override, so your presence would be futile.”

“So why are you obviously so keen to talk me out of going in there?”

The Mademoiselle did not answer.

Two bulkheads further, they reached the ceiling access point which led to the chamber. They were running by that point, and it took a few moments for the water to stop sloshing up and down the angled sides of the corridor. When it did, Volyova frowned.

“Something’s up,” she said.

“What?”

“Can’t you hear it? There’s a noise.” She angled her head. “Seems to be coming from the gunnery itself.”

Khouri could hear it for herself now. It was a high-pitched mechanical sound, like ancient industrial machinery going haywire.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Volyova paused. “At least, I hope I don’t. Let’s get inside.”

Volyova reached up and tugged at the overhead access door, budging it open, a small shower of ship-sludge loosening from its seals, spattering their shoulders. The alloy ladder descended, the industrial noise intensifying. It was clearly coming from the gunnery itself. The gunnery’s bright internal lights were on, but they appeared to be unsteady, as if something were moving around up there interrupting the light-beams. Whatever it was was moving quickly as well.

“Ilia,” she said. “I’m not sure I like this.”

“Join the club.”

Her bracelet chimed. Volyova was bending to examine it when an almighty shudder rammed through the entire fabric of the ship. The two of them slipped into the floodwater, falling against the slippery corridor-sides. Khouri was struggling to her feet when a tiny tidal wave of viscous sludge upended her. She hit the deck. For a moment she was swallowing the stuff, the closest to eating shit since her army days. Volyova hooked her by the elbows, hauling her to her feet. Khouri gagged and spat out the sludge, though the awful taste lingered.

Volyova’s bracelet was in scream-mode again.

“What the hell…”

“The shuttle,” Volyova said. “We just lost it.”

“What?”

“I mean it just got blown up.” Volyova coughed. Her face was wet; she must have taken a good mouthful of the stuff herself. “Far as I can tell, the cache-weapon didn’t even have to push its way out. Secondary weapons did the job—turned on the shuttle.”

Above, the gunnery was still making frightening noises.

“You want me to go up there, don’t you?”

Volyova nodded. “Right now, getting you in the chair is the only option we have left. But don’t worry. I’m right behind you.”

“Listen to her,” the Mademoiselle said, quite suddenly. “All ready to have you do what she hasn’t the guts to do herself.”

“Or the implants,” Khouri shouted, aloud.

“What?” Volyova said.

“Nothing.” Khouri planted one foot on the lowest rung. “Just telling an old friend to go stuff herself.” Her foot slid off the slime-encrusted rung. Next attempt, she found something approximating a grip and planted her second foot on the same rung. Her head was poking into the little access tunnel which fed into the gunnery, no more than two metres above.

“You won’t get in,” the Mademoiselle said. “I’m controlling the chair. As soon as you put your head into the chamber, you lose it.”

“I’d love to see the look on your face, in that case.”

“Khouri, haven’t you grasped things yet? The loss of your head would be no more than a minor inconvenience.”

Her head was just below the chamber entrance now. She could see the gimballed chair, moving in whiplash arcs through the chamber’s volume. It had never been designed for such acrobatics; Khouri could smell the ozone of fried power-systems greasing the air. “Volyova,” she called, shouting above the din. “You built this set-up. Can you cut the power to the chair from below?”

“Cut power to the chair? Certainly—but what good would it do us? I need you linking in to the gunnery.”

“Not everything—just enough to stop the bastard moving around.”

There was a brief pause, during which Khouri imagined Volyova summoning ancient wiring diagrams to mind. The woman had constructed the gunnery herself—but it might have been decades and decades of subjective time ago, and something as vulgarly functional as the main power trunk had probably never needed to be upgraded since.

“Well,” Volyova said, eventually. “There’s a main feed line here—I suppose I could sever it…”

Volyova left, trudging quickly out of sight below. It sounded simple; severing the power feed. Maybe, Khouri thought, Volyova would have to fetch a specialised cutter from elsewhere. Surely there was not that much time. But no; Volyova had something. There was that little laser, the one she used to flense away samples from Captain Brannigan. She always carried it. Agonising seconds passed, Khouri thinking of the cache-weapon, easing slowly beyond the hull, entering naked space. By now it would be locking on target—Resurgam—going to final power-up, preparing to unleash a pulse of gravitational death.

Above, the noise stopped.

All was still, the light steady. The chair hung motionless within its gimbals, a throne imprisoned within an elegantly curved cage.

Volyova shouted, “Khouri, there’s a secondary power-source. The gunnery can tap it, if it senses a drain from the main feed. Means you might not have much time to reach the chair…”

Khouri sprang into the gunnery, heaving her body weight out of the hole in the floor. The slender alloy gimbals now looked sharper than before. She moved fast, monkeying through the feed lines, hopping under or above the gimbals. The chair was still static, but the closer she got, the less room she would have if the apparatus swung into motion again. If it happened now, she thought, the walls would be rapidly redecorated in sticky, coagulating red.

And then she was in. Khouri buckled, and the instant she closed the clasp, the chair whined and shot forwards. The gimbals rolled about her, swerving the chair backwards and forwards, upside down and sideways, until all sense of orientation was lost. The motion was neck-breaking, and Khouri felt her eyeballs bulging out of their sockets with each hairpin reversal—but the motion was surely less vicious than before.

She wants to deter me, Khouri thought, but not kill me… yet.

“Don’t attempt to hook in,” the Mademoiselle said.

“Because it might screw up your little plan?”

“Not at all. Might I remind you of Sun Stealer? He’s waiting in there.”

The chair was still bucking, but not so violently as to hinder conscious thought.

“Maybe he doesn’t exist,” Khouri said, subvocalising. “Maybe you invented him to have more leverage over me.”

“Go ahead then.”

Khouri made the helmet lower itself down over her head, masking the whirling motion of the chamber. Her palm rested on the interface control. All it would take was slight pressure to initiate the link; to close the circuit which would result in her psyche being sucked into the military data-abstraction known as gunspace.

“You can’t do it, can you? Because you believe me. Once you open that connection, there’s no going back.”

She increased the pressure, feeling the slight give as the control threatened to close. Then—either via some unconscious neuromuscular twitch, or because part of her knew it had to be done, she closed the connection. The gunnery environment enfolded around her, as it had done in a thousand tactical simulations. Spatial data came first: her own body-image become nebulous, replaced by the lighthugger and its immediate surroundings, and then a series of hierarchical overlays conveying the tactical/strategic situation, constantly updating, self-checking its own assumptions, running frantic realtime-extrapolated simulations.

She assimilated.

The cache-weapon was holding station, several hundred metres away from the hull. Its prong was pointed in the direction of flight, straight towards Resurgam—allowing, Khouri knew, for the tiny relativistic light-bending effects caused by their moderate velocity. Near the space-door from which the weapon had emerged, the shuttle had left a black smear along the side of the hull. There were damage-points there; Khouri felt them as little pricks of discomfort, numbing as auto-repair systems phased in. Gravity sensors felt ripples emanating from the weapon; Khouri felt periodic—and quickening—breezes wash over her. The black holes in the weapon must be spinning up, orbiting quicker and quicker around the torus.

A presence sniffed her, not from outside, but from within the gunnery itself.

“Sun Stealer’s detected your entry,” the Mademoiselle said.

“No problem.” Khouri reached out into gunspace, slipping abstract hands into cybernetically realised gauntlets. “I’m accessing ship’s defences. A few seconds is all I need.”

But something was wrong. The weapons felt differently from the way they had in simulation; unwilling to budge to her whims. Quickly she intuited: they were being fought over, and she was merely joining in the struggle.

The Mademoiselle—or rather, her avatar—was trying to block the hull defences, prevent them from being turned on the cache-weapon. The weapon itself was firmly out of Khouri’s reach, veiled by numerous firewalls. But who—or what—was resisting the Mademoiselle, trying to bring those weapons to bear? Sun Stealer, of course. She could sense him now. Vast, powerful, but also intent on invisibility and slyness, careful to camouflage his actions behind routine data movements. For years that had worked, and Volyova had known nothing of his presence. But now Sun Stealer was driven to recklessness, like a crab forced to scuttle from one hideaway to another by the retreating tide. Nothing remotely human; no sense that this third presence in the gunnery was anything so mundane as another downloaded personality simulation; what Sun Stealer felt like was pure mentality, as if this data-representation was all that he had ever been; all that he ever would be.

It felt like absolutely nothing—but a locus of nothingness which had somehow achieved a terrifying degree of organisation.

Was she seriously contemplating joining forces with this thing?

Maybe. If that was what it took to stop the Mademoiselle.

“You can still back out,” the woman said. “He’s busy at the moment—can’t spare his energies to invade you. But in a moment that won’t be the case.”

Now the aiming systems were at least under her control, although they operated sluggishly. She bracketed the cache-weapon, encasing the whole bulk in a potential sphere of annihilation. Now all that had to happen was for the Mademoiselle to surrender control of the weapons, if only for the microsecond necessary for them to slew, target and fire.

She felt them loosen. She—or rather, she and Sun Stealer—seemed to be winning.

“Don’t do this, Khouri. You don’t know what’s at stake…”

“Then clue me in, bitch. Tell me what’s so important.”

The cache-weapon was moving away from the hull, surely a sign that the Mademoiselle was worried about its safety. But the pulses of gravitational radiation were quickening, now coming almost too rapidly to separate. No guessing how long it would be before the cache-weapon fired, but Khouri suspected it could only be seconds away.

“Listen,” the Mademoiselle said. “You want the truth, Khouri?”

“Damn right I do.”

“Then you’d better brace yourself. You’re about to get the whole thing.”

And then—as soon as she had adjusted to being sucked into gunspace—she felt herself being sucked somewhere else entirely. The odd thing was that it seemed to be a part of herself she had until that moment completely overlooked.

They were on a battlefield, surrounded by the chameleoflaged bubbletents, the temporary enclosures of some hospital or forward command post. The sky above the compound was azure, cloud-streaked, but littered with dirty, intermingling vapour trails. It was as if some world-spanning squid were spilling its viscera into the stratosphere. Sowing the trails, and darting between them, were numerous arrow-winged jet aircraft. Lower, there were drone-dirigibles and, lower still, bulbous-bodied transport helicopters, tilt-wings and veetols, skimming the periphery of the compound, occasionally dropping to disgorge armoured personnel carriers or walking troops, ambulances or armed servitors. There was a scorched, grass-covered apron to one side of the compound, where six delta-winged, windowless aircraft were parked on skids, their upper surfaces precisely mimicking the sun-bleached hue of the ground, their VTOL irises open for inspection.

Khouri felt herself stumbling, falling towards the grass at her feet. She wore chameleoflage fatigues, currently emitting in dappled khaki. There was a lightweight projectile weapon in her hands, its alloy grip contour-moulded to match her palm. She was helmeted, a two-d readout monocle dangling down from the helmet’s rim, showing a false-colour heat-map of the battlezone, telemetered from one of the dirigibles.

“This way, please.”

A whitehat was directing her into one of the bubbletents. Inside, an aide took her gun, ident-chipped it and racked it with eight other weapons, varying in firepower from projectile units like her own to medium-yield party-poopers and a ferocious shoulder-held ack-am weapon, something one would really not want to use on the same continent as one’s adversary. The feed from the dirigibles fuzzed and vanished, occluded by the anti-surveillance shroud around the bubbletent. She reached up with her now free hand and flicked the monocle back over the helmet rim, raking a strand of sweaty hair away from her eye with the same movement.

“Through here, Khouri.”

They led her into a partitioned back area of the tent, through a room filled with bunkbeds, injured, and quietly humming med-servitors, craning over their patients like mechanised green swans. From outside she heard a shriek of jets, then a series of concussive explosions, but no one inside the tent seemed to even notice the sound.

Finally they let her into a tiny, square-walled room outfitted with a single desk. The walls were draped with the transnational flags of the Northern Coalition and there was a large bronze-mounted globe of Sky’s Edge on one corner of the desk. The globe was currently in geological mode, showing only the varying landmasses and terrain-types on the surface, rather than the hotly contested political boundaries. But Khouri paid it no more than cursory attention, because what snared her attention was the person sitting behind the desk, in full military dress: cross-buttoned olive-drab tunic, gold epaulettes, a conspicuous panoply of NC medals ranked across his chest, his black hair slicked back in brilliant grooves.

“I’m sorry,” Fazil said. “That it had to happen this way. But now that you’re here…” He motioned across the room. “Have a seat; we need to talk. Rather urgently, as it happens.”

Khouri recalled, distantly, another place. She remembered a chamber, metallic, containing a seat, but while there was something about the memory that made her nervous—as if time were precious—-it felt unreal compared to the present, which was this room. Fazil absorbed her attention totally. He looked exactly as she remembered him (remembered him from where, she wondered?), although his cheek bore evidence of a scar she did not recall, and he had grown a moustache, or at least (she could not be sure) changed something about the one he had worn last time; thickened it or allowed it to grow out from simply thick black stubble, to the point where it now had the onset of a rakish droop on either side of his upper lip.

She did as he had suggested, easing herself into a folding chair.

“She—the Mademoiselle—worried that it might come to this,” Fazil said, his lips barely moving, or seeming to move, beneath the moustache. “So she took certain measures. While you were still on Yellowstone, she implanted a series of closed-access memories. They were tagged to activate—to become accessible to your conscious mind—only when she deemed them useful.” He reached across the desk and spun the globe, allowing it to whir before stopping it abruptly. “As a matter of fact, the process of unlocking those memories began some while ago. Do you remember a slight migraine attack in the elevator?”

Khouri grasped for some anchor-point; some objective reality she could place her trust in.

“What is this?”

“A convenience,” Fazil said. “Woven partially out of existing memory patterns the Mademoiselle appropriated and found useful. This meeting, for instance—isn’t it a little like how we first met, darling? That time in the ops unit on Hill Seventy-Eight, in the central provinces campaign, before the second red-peninsula offensive? You’d been sent to me because I needed someone for an infiltration mission; someone with knowledge of the unshielded SC-controlled sectors. We made a great team, didn’t we? In more ways than one.” He fondled his moustache and tapped the globe again. “Of course, I didn’t—or rather she didn’t—bring you here just to reminisce. No; the mere fact that this memory has been accessed means that certain truths have to be revealed to you. The question is, are you ready for them?”

“Of course I’m…” Khouri trailed off. What Fazil was saying made no sense, but she was being troubled by that memory of the other place; of the brutal chair in the metallic room. She had the feeling something was unresolved there—even, possibly, in the process of being resolved. She felt that, wherever that room was, she was meant to be there, adding her weight to the struggle. Whatever that struggle concerned, she had the sense that there was not much time left, and certainly not enough for this diversion.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Fazil said, appearing to read her mind. “None of this is really taking place in realtime; not even the accelerated realtime of the gunnery. Haven’t you ever had it happen to you that someone wakes you abruptly from a dream, and yet somehow their actions were incorporated into the dream’s narrative, long before they actually woke you? You know what I mean: your dog licks your face to wake you, and in your dream you fall overboard from a ship into the sea. Yet you’d been on that ship for the entirety of the dream.” He paused. “Memory, Khouri. Memory being laid down instantaneously. The dream felt real, but it was created in an instant when the dog began licking your face. Back-constructed. You never actually lived through it. It’s the same with these memories.”

Fazil’s mention of the gunnery had crystallised the concept of the room. More than ever she felt as if she had to be back there, engaging in a struggle. The details of it still escaped her, it seemed very important that she rejoin it.

“The Mademoiselle,” Fazil continued, “could have selected any venue from your past, or manufactured one from scratch. But she felt that—in some way—it would assist matters if you were put in a frame of mind where the discussion of military matters seemed natural.”

“Military matters?”

“Specifically, a war.” He smiled then, causing the tips of his moustache to angle momentarily upwards, like a demonstration of the engineering principles of a cantilever bridge. “But not one you’re likely to have ever read about. No; I’m afraid it happened rather too long ago for that.” He stood without warning, pausing to straighten his tunic, tugging down the belt. “It might help if we adjourned to the briefing room, actually.”