Revelation Space (36 page)

“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 the 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.”