'She could have lived. Hell, even leaving her to die the way I did -- even that would have been acceptable if I'd had the courage to tell the truth about it afterwards. That would have been some atonement; God knows she deserved better than to be lied about, even after I'd killed her.'

'You didn't kill her; the Shroud did.'

'I don't even know that.'

'What?'

He leant on his side, momentarily pausing to study Pascale. Before, his eyes could have frozen her image for posterity. But that feature no longer functioned.

'What I mean is,' Sylveste said, 'I don't even know she died out there -- I mean, not at first. I survived, after all -- and I was the one who lost the Juggler transform. Her chances would have been better, though not by much. But what if she came through it, the way I did? What if she found a way to stay alive, but just couldn't communicate her presence to me? She might have drifted halfway to the edge of the Shroud before I came round. After I'd repaired the lighthugger, I never thought to look for her. It never crossed my mind she might still be alive.'

'For a very good reason,' Pascale said. 'She wasn't. You can question what you did now, but back then intuition told you she was dead. And if she didn't die -- she'd have found a way to get in touch with you.'

'I don't know that. I never can.'

'Then stop dwelling on it. Or else you'll never escape the past.'

'Listen,' he said, thinking of something else Falkender had said. 'Do you ever speak to anyone apart from the guards? Like Sluka, or anyone like that?'

'Sluka?'

'The woman who's holding us here.' Sylveste realised with a yawning sensation that they had told her next to nothing. 'There isn't time for me to explain in anything but the simplest terms. The people who killed your father were True Path Inundationists, as near as I can tell, or at least one offshoot of the movement. We're in Mantell.'

'I knew it had to be somewhere outside Cuvier.'

'Yes, and from what they told me Cuvier has been attacked.' He held back from telling her the rest, which was that the city had most probably been rendered uninhabitable above ground. She did not have to know that -- not just yet, when it was the only place she had ever known properly. 'I'm not really sure who's running it now -- whether people loyal to your father, or a rival group of True Pathers. The way Sluka tells it, your father didn't exactly welcome her with open arms once he'd gained control of Cuvier. Seems there was enough enmity there for her to arrange his assassination.'

'That's a long time to hold a grudge.'

'Which is why Sluka is possibly not the most stable person on this planet. Actually, I don't think capturing us figured in her plans -- but now she's got us, she isn't quite sure what to do. Clearly we're too potentially valuable to discard... but in the meantime----' Sylveste paused. 'Anyway, something may be about to change. The man who fixed my eyes told me there was a rumour about visitors.'

'Who?'

'My question as well. But that's as much as he said.' 'It's tempting to speculate, isn't it?'

'If anything was likely to change things on Resurgam, it would be the arrival of Ultras.'

'It's a bit soon for Remilliod to return.'

Sylveste nodded. 'If there really is a ship coming in, you can bet it isn't Remilliod. But who else would want to trade with us?'

'Maybe trade isn't what they've come for.'

Possibly it was a sign of arrogance, but Volyova was not physically capable of letting someone else do her work, no matter how absurd the alternative. She was perfectly happy -- if happy was the word -- to let Khouri sit in the gunnery and do her best at shooting the cache-weapon out of the sky.

She was also willing to admit that using Khouri was the only sensible option available. But that did not mean that she was prepared to sit calmly by and await the outcome. Volyova knew herself too well for that. What she needed -- what she craved -- was some way to attack the problem from another angle.

'Svinoi,' she said, because, no matter how hard she tried, an answer obdurately failed to pop into her mind. Every time she thought she had hit on an approach, a way to circumvent the weapon's progress, another part of her mind had already jumped ahead and found some impasse further down the logical chain. It was, in a way, a testament to the fluidity of her thought that she was able to critique her own solutions as soon as they came to mind; in fact, almost before she became consciously aware of them. But it also felt -- maddeningly -- as if she was doing her level best to sabotage her own chances of success.

And now there was this aberration to deal with.

She called it that now, because the word served to contain the melange of incomprehension and disgust she felt whenever she forced her mind onto the topic. The topic was whatever was going on inside Khouri's head. And, now that Khouri was immersed in the abstracted mental landscape of gunspace, the aberration necessarily included the gunnery itself, and by extension Volyova, since it was her handiwork. She was monitoring the situation closely, via neural readouts on her bracelet.

There was quite a storm going on in that woman's skull; no doubt about it. And the storm was extending troubled, flickering tendrils into gunspace.

Volyova knew that, somehow, all of this had to be related. The whole problem with the gunnery, from the beginning: Nagorny's madness, the Sun Stealer business, and latterly the self-activation of the cache-weapon. Somehow, also, the storm in Khouri's head -- the aberration -- also fitted in with things. But knowing that a solution existed, or at the very least an answer -- a unifying picture which would explain everything -- did not help at all.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect was that, even in a moment like this, part of her mind was dwelling on that problem, not giving itself over fully to the more pressing issue at hand. Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and -- if only they would pool themselves -- capable of shattering insights. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing.

A thought budged to the front of her mind; a recollection. It concerned a series of firewall systems she had installed in the ship, upwards of four decades earlier by shiptime. She had intended that they be called into use as a final countermeasure against incursion by subversive viruses. It had not occurred to her that they would ever really be needed, and most certainly not under circumstances like this.

But all the same, she remembered them.

'Volyova,' she said, almost gasping, into her bracelet, straining to tug the requisite commands from her memory. 'Access counterinsurgent protocols; lambda-plus severity, maximum battle- readiness concurrence and counter-check to be assumed, full autonomous denial-suppression, criticality-nine Armageddon defaults, red-one-alpha security-bypass, all Triumvirate privileges invoked at all levels; all non-Triumvirate privileges rescinded.' She collected her breath; hoping that the string of incantations had opened enough doors for her into the heart of the ship's operational matrix. 'Now,' she said. 'Retrieve and run the executable coded Palsy.' To herself she muttered, 'And do it damned quickly!'

Palsy was the program which initiated the sealing of the firewalls she had installed. She had written Palsy herself -- but it was so long ago that she barely remembered what Palsy did, or how much of the ship Palsy was liable to affect. It was a gamble -- she wanted to immobilise enough to inconvenience the cache-weapon, but most certainly not enough to hamper her own attempts at stopping it.

'Svinoi, svinoi, svinoi...'

Error-messages were scrolling across her bracelet. They were telling her, very helpfully, that the various systems which Palsy had attempted to access and disable were no longer within Palsy's remit; they were out-of-bounds to the program's interference. Most of them, anyway -- especially the deeper ship systems. If Palsy had functioned correctly, it would have had the same general effect on the ship as a blow on the head had to a human being -- massive shut-down of all nonessential systems, and a general collapse into a state of recuperative immobility. Real damage would have been done, but mostly on a superficial level, and of a sort that Volyova would have been able to fix, disguise or invent lies about before the other crewmembers were awakened. But Palsy had worked differently. If likened to a human affliction, what the ship had suffered was more akin to an episode of mild paralysis immobilising only the epidermal layers, and then only partially.

That was not at all in accordance with Volyova's plans.

But, she realised, it would have immobilised the autonomous hull weapons, those which were not directly slaved to the gunnery and which had already blown up the shuttle. Now at least she could try the same gambit again. Of course, the weapon would have advanced further now; there was no longer an option of simply obstructing it. But if she could at least get another shuttle out into space, certain possibilities presented themselves.

A second or so later, her optimism had been shattered into a few dismal crumbs of dejection.

Maybe Palsy had been meant to work this way, or maybe in the intervening forty years various ship-systems had become tangled up and interconnected, so that Palsy killed certain parts Volyova had never meant it to touch... but, for whatever reason, the shuttles were inoperative, locked out by firewalls. She tried, perfunctorily, the usual Triumvirate-level bypass commands, but none of them worked. Hardly surprising: Palsy had set up physical breaks in the command network, chasms that no amount of software intervention could possibly bridge. To get the shuttles online, Volyova would have to physically reset all those breaks -- and to do that, she would have to find the map she had made, four decades earlier, of the installations. That would entail, conservatively, several days'

work.

Instead, she had minutes in which to act.

She was sucked into -- not so much a pit of despondency, as a bottomless, endlessly plummeting gravitational well. But, when she had dropped deep into its maw -- and several of those precious minutes had elapsed -- she remembered something; something so obvious she should have thought of it long before.

Volyova began running.

Khouri crashed back into the gunnery.

A quick check on the status-clocks confirmed what Fazil had promised her, which was that no real time had passed. That was some trick; she really felt as if she had spent the best part of an hour in the bubbletent, when in fact the whole experience had just been laid down a fraction of a second earlier. She had lived through none of it, but that was almost impossible to accept. Yet she could not now relax -- events had been frantic enough even before the memories had been triggered. The situation had not lost any of its urgency.

The cache-weapon must be nearly ready to blow now: its gravitational emissions were no longer detectable by the ship, like a whistle which had passed into the ultrasonic. Maybe the weapon was already able to fire. Was the Mademoiselle actually holding back? Was it important to her that Khouri come over to her side? If the weapon failed, Khouri would again be her only means of acting.

'Relinquish,' the Mademoiselle said. 'Relinquish, Khouri. You must realise by now that Sun Stealer is something alien! You're assisting it!'

The mental effort involved in subvocalising was almost too much for her now.

'Yeah, I'm quite prepared to believe that it's alien. The trouble is, what does that make you?'

'Khouri, we don't have time for this.'

'Sorry, but now seems as good a time as ever to get this into the open.' While she communicated her thoughts, Khouri kept up her side in the struggle, though part of her -- the part that been swayed by what she had been shown in the memories -- implored her to give up; to let the Mademoiselle assume total control of the cache-weapon. 'You led me into thinking Sun Stealer was something Sylveste brought back from the Shrouders.'

'No; you saw the facts and jumped to the only logical conclusion.'

'Did I hell.' Khouri found new strength now, though it remained insufficient to tip the balance.

'All along, you were desperate to turn me against Sun Stealer. Now, that may or may not have been justified -- maybe he is an evil bastard -- but it does beg a question. How would you know? You wouldn't. Not unless you were alien yourself.'

'Assuming -- for the moment -- that that were the case----'

Something new snared Khouri's attention. Even given the severity of the battle she was waging, this new thing was sufficiently important for her to relax momentarily; allocating some additional part of her conscious mind to assess the situation.

Something else was joining the fray.

This newcomer was not in gunspace; it was not another cybernetic entity, but a physical object, one which until now had not been present -- or at least not noticed -- in the arena of battle. At the moment Khouri had detected it, it was very close to the lighthugger; dangerously close by her reckoning -- in fact, so close that it seemed to be physically attached, parasitic.

It was the size of a very small spacecraft, its central mass no more than ten metres from end to end. It resembled a fat, ribbed torpedo, sprouting eight articulated legs. It was walking along the hull of the ship. Most miraculously, it was not being shot at by the same defences which had destroyed the shuttle.

'Ilia...' Khouri breathed. 'Ilia, you aren't seriously thinking----' And then, a moment later, 'Oh shit.

You were, weren't you?'

'What foolishness,' the Mademoiselle said.

The spider-room had detached itself from the hull, each of its eight legs releasing its grip simultaneously. Since the ship was still decelerating, the spider-room seemed to fall forwards with increasing speed. Ordinarily, so Volyova had said, the room would have fired its grapples at that point, to re-establish contact with the ship. Volyova must have disabled them, because the room kept falling, until its thrusters kicked in. Although Khouri was perceiving the scene via many different routes, and in some modes which would not have been assimilable to someone lacking the gunspace implants, a small aspect of that sensory stream was devoted to the optical, relayed from the external cameras on the ship. Via that channel she saw the thrusters burn violet-hot, jetting from pinprick-apertures around the midsection of the spider-room, where the torpedo-shaped body was attached to the turret from which sprouted the now purchaseless legs. The glare underlit the legs, picking them out in rapid strobing flashes as the room adjusted its fall, negated it and began to heave-to alongside the ship once more. But Volyova did not use the thrusters to bring the room within grasping range. After loitering for a few seconds, the room fell laterally away, accelerating towards the weapon.

'Ilia... I really don't think----'

'Trust me,' the Triumvir's voice replied, cutting into gunspace as if she were speaking from halfway across the universe, not merely a few kilometres from Khouri's position. 'I've got what you might charitably refer to as a plan. Or at the very least an option on going out fighting.'

'I'm not sure I liked the last bit.'

'Me neither, in case you were wondering.' Volyova paused. 'Incidentally, Khouri, when all this is over -- assuming we both survive all of this, which I admit isn't exactly guaranteed at this juncture...

I rather think we ought to set aside time for a little chat.'

Maybe she was talking to blank out the fear she must be feeling. 'A little chat?'

'About all of this. The whole problem with the gunnery. It might also be a chance for you to ease yourself of any... niggling little burdens you might have been well advised to share with me much earlier.'

'Like what?'

'Like who you are, for a start.'

The spider-room covered the distance to the weapon rapidly, using its thrusters to slow down, but still holding station relative to the ship, maintaining a standard one-gee aft burn. Even with its legs splayed, the spider-room was less than a third the size of the cache-weapon. It looked less like a spider now, and more like a hapless squid, about to vanish into the maw of a slowly cruising whale.

'That's going to take more than a little chat,' Khouri said, feeling -- with, she suspected, no little justification -- that there was really no point holding much back from Volyova any more.

'Good. Now excuse me for a moment; what I'm about to try is somewhat on the tricky side of downright impossible.'

'She means suicidal,' the Mademoiselle said.

'You're enjoying all this, aren't you?'

'Immensely -- more so given that I have no control over anything that transpires.'

Volyova had positioned the spider-room near the projecting spike of the cache-weapon, although she was too far from it for the wriggling mechanical legs to gain a scramblehold on the pitted surface. In any case, the weapon was moving around now, oscillating slowly and randomly from side to side with fierce bursts of its own thrusters, seemingly trying to evade Volyova's approach, but restricted in its movements by its own inertia -- just as if the mighty hell-class weapon was scared of a tiny little spider. Khouri heard four rapid pops, almost too closely spaced to discriminate, as if a projectile weapon had emptied its chamber.

She watched as four grapple lines whipped out from the body of the spider-room, impacting silently with the cache-weapon's spike. The grapples were penetrators; designed to burrow a few tens of centimetres into their target before widening, so once they had bitten home there was no possibility of their breaking loose. The guy lines were illuminated by the arcing thrusters, taut now, and the spider-room was already hauling itself in, even though the weapon had kept up its ponderous evasions.

'Great,' Khouri said. 'I was all ready to shoot the bastard -- now what do I do?'

'You get a chance, you shoot,' Volyova said. 'If you can focus the blast away from me, I'll take my chances -- this room's better armoured than you'd think.' A moment's silence, then: 'Ah, good.

Got you, you vicious piece of junk.'

She had the legs of the spider-room wrapped around the spike now. The weapon appeared to have given up all hope of dislodging her, and perhaps with good reason: it struck Khouri that Volyova had not achieved much, despite her valiant attempt. In all probability, the cache-weapon was not going to be greatly hindered by the arrival of the spider-room.

The struggle for control of the hull weapons had, meanwhile, resumed in earnest. Occasionally Khouri felt them budge slightly, the Mademoiselle's systems momentarily losing the battle, but these tiny slippages were never enough to allow Khouri to target and deploy. And if Sun Stealer was assisting her, she did not feel it, although possibly that absence of presence was simply an artefact of his extreme cunning. Perhaps if Sun Stealer had not been there, she would have lost the battle completely, and -- freed of this diversion -- the Mademoiselle would already have unleashed whatever it was that the weapon held. Right now the distinction felt rather irrelevant. She had just noticed what it was that Volyova was doing. The spider-room's thrusters were firing in concert now, resisting the thrust that the larger but clumsier weapon was applying.

Volyova was dragging the weapon downship, towards the spewing blue-white radiance that was the lighthugger's nearest thrust-beam. She was going to kill the damned thing by taking it into the searing exhaust of the Conjoiner drive.

'Ilia,' Khouri said. 'Are you sure this is... considered?'

'Considered?' This time there was no mistaking the woman's clucking laughter, even though it sounded institutional. 'It's the most ill-considered thing I've ever done, Khouri. But right now I don't see many alternatives. Not unless you get those guns online damn quickly.'

'I'm... working on it.'

'Well work on it some more and stop bothering me. In case it hadn't occurred to you, I've got rather a lot on my mind right now.'

'Her whole life flashing before her eyes, I should imagine.'

'Oh, you again.' Khouri ignored the Mademoiselle, realising by now that her interjections served the sly purpose of distracting her; that by doing so she was indeed interfering in the course of the battle; not nearly so ineffective a bystander as she maintained.

Volyova had now less than five hundred metres to go before she dragged the cache-weapon into the flames. It was putting up a fight, thrusters going haywire, but its overall thrust capacity was less than that of the spider-room. Understandable, Khouri thought. When its designers had conceived the ancillary systems which would be required to move and position the device, the idea that it would also have to fend for itself in a wrestling match had probably not been uppermost in their minds.

'Khouri,' Volyova said, 'in about thirty seconds I'm going to release the svinoi. Assuming my sums are right, no amount of corrective thrust will be able to stop it drifting into the beam.'

'That's good, isn't it?'

'Well, sort of. But I feel I ought to warn you...' Volyova's voice faded in and out of clarity, reception compromised by the broiling energies of the propulsion beam, which she was now approaching at distances not usually considered wise for the organic. 'It's occurred to me that even if I succeed in destroying the cache-weapon... some part of the blast -- something exotic, perhaps -- might get sent back up the drive beam, into the propulsion core.' A pause that was definitely intentional. 'If that happens, the results might not be... optimal.'

'Well, thanks,' Khouri said. 'I appreciate the morale-building.'