“How the—”
“The ship sent it. The
Infinity
.” For once, Volyova sounded breathless with excitement; as if this was something she had been desperately anxious to tell someone. “I thought it was going to kill me. That’s all I was waiting for; that final attack. But it didn’t come. Instead, the ship sent out a shuttle for me.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. Sun Stealer should still be running it; should still be trying to finish us off. . . ”
“No,” Volyova said, still with the same tone of childish delight, “no; it makes perfect sense—provided what I did worked, which I think it must have—”
“What did you do, Ilia?”
“I—um—let the Captain warm.”
“You did
what
?”
“Yes; it was rather a terminal approach to the problem. But I thought if one parasite was trying to gain control of the ship, the surest way to fight it was by unleashing an even more potent one.” Volyova paused, as if awaiting Khouri’s confirmation that this had indeed been a sensible thing to do. When none came, she continued, “This was barely a day ago—do you know what that means? The plague must have transformed a substantial mass of the ship in only a few hours! The speed of the transformation must have been incredible; centimetres a second!”
“Are you sure it was wise?”
“Khouri, it’s probably the least wise thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it does seem to have worked. At the very least, we’ve swapped one megalomaniac for another—but this one doesn’t seem quite so dedicated to our destruction.”
“I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Where are you now? Have you been back aboard yet?”
“Hardly. No, I’ve spent the last few hours searching for you. Where the hell are you, Khouri? I can’t seem to get a meaningful fix on your location.”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“Well, we’ll see. But I want you aboard this ship as soon as possible. I’m not going back into the lighthugger alone, in case you had any doubts. I don’t think it’s going to look quite the way we remembered it. You—uh—can reach me, can’t you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Khouri did what she had been told she should do, when she wanted to leave the surface of Hades. It made very little sense, but Pascale had been quite insistent—she had said it was a message that the matrix would understand; one that would cause it to project its bubble of low-field gravity into space; a bottle in which she could ride to safety.
She spread arms wide, as if she had wings; as if she could fly.
The red ground—fluctuating, shimmering as ever—dropped smoothly away.