“Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”
“You can’t let Girardieau win. If a coup’s imminent, you need to be back in Cuvier. There you can muster what little support you may have left.”
Sylveste looked through the crawler’s window, towards the box grid. Shadows were crossing the baulks—workers deserting the dig, moving silently towards the sanctuary of the other crawler. “This could be the most important find since we arrived.”
“And you may have to sacrifice it. If you keep Girardieau at bay, you’ll at least have the luxury of returning here and looking for it again. But if Girardieau wins, nothing you’ve found here will matter a damn.”
“I know,” Sylveste said. For a moment there was no animosity between them. Calvin’s reasoning was flawless, and it would have been churlish to pretend otherwise.
“Then will you be following my advice?”
He moved his hand to the escritoire, ready to eject the cartridge. “I’ll think about it.”
TWO
Aboard a lighthugger, interstellar space, 2543The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.
She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with various simulations of once-living figures from the ship’s distant past. She had been trying to catch them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than ever. The elevator’s air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for her to veil the interior with smoke.