‘It is my name,’ she said. ‘But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard
Thorn folded his arms. ‘Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere.’
‘The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus/Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.’
‘And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?’
‘There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.’
‘A mutiny?’
Khouri bit her lip and nodded. ‘Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.’
‘Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?’
Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.
‘I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.’
He touched a finger to his lip. ‘Try me.’
‘Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.’
‘You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.’
He shrugged. ‘Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?’
‘Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.’ She raised a finger, anticipating his point. I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I — this me — didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.‘
‘But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn — subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.’
‘He’d take an interest in us?’
‘He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.’
‘So what was that thing?’
‘An envoy, I suppose. A chunk of Hades, sent out to gather information. And Sylveste sent a copy of himself along with it. The envoy learned what it could, buzzed around the machinery, shadowed us, and then headed back to Hades. Presumably when it gets there it’ll merge back into the matrix. Maybe it was never totally disconnected — there could have been a filament of nuclear matter a single quark wide stretching all the way from the marble back to the edge of the system, and we’d never have known it.’
‘Go back a bit. What happened after you left Hades? Did Ilia come with you?’
