Revelation Space

TWELVE

The briefing room into which Fazil escorted Khouri was unlike any she had ever visited. It was clearly far too large for the bubbletent to have ever held it. And while Khouri had experienced many projection devices, none of them would have been capable of displaying the thing that was now being presented to her. It covered the entire floor, across a space about twenty metres wide, and was circumnavigated by a metal-railinged walkway.

It was a map of the entire galaxy.

And what made it impossible that the map could ever have been projected by the devices with which she was familiar was one simple fact. Looking at it, she apprehended—saw, and, somehow noted—every single star in the galaxy, from the coolest, barely fusing brown dwarf up to the brightest, transient white-hot supergiant. And it was not just that every star in the galaxy was there to be noticed, if her gaze chanced upon it. It went beyond that. It was, simply, that the galaxy was knowable in one glance. She was assimilating it in its entirety.

She counted the stars.

There were four hundred and sixty-six billion, three hundred and eleven million, nine hundred and twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and eleven of them. As she watched, one of the white supergiants expired in a supernova, so she revised her count down by one.

“It’s a trick,” Fazil said. “A codification. There are more stars in the galaxy than there are cells in the human brain, so for you to know them all would tie up an undesirable fraction of your total connective memory. Which doesn’t mean that the sensation of omniscience can’t be simulated, of course.”

The galaxy was in fact too perfectly detailed to really be described as a map. Not only had every star been accorded due prominence—colours, sizes, luminosities, binary associations, positions and space velocities all represented with absolute fidelity—but there were also star-forming regions, wispish, gently glowing veils of condensing gas, in which were embedded the hottening embers of embryo suns. There were newly formed stars surrounded by disks of protoplanetary material, and—where she cared to apprehend them—planetary systems themselves, ticking round their central suns like microscopic orreries, at a vastly accelerated rate. There were also aged stars which had ejected shells of their own photospheres into space, enriching the tenuous interstellar medium: the basic protoplasmic reservoir from which future generations of stars, worlds and cultures would eventually be created. There were regular or irregular supernova remnants, cooling as they expanded and shed their energy to the interstellar medium. Sometimes, at the heart of one of these stellar death-events, she observed a newly forged pulsar, emitting radio bursts with ever-slowing but stately precision, like the clocks in some forgotten imperial palace which had been wound one final time and would now tick until they died, the time between each tick lengthening towards some chill eternity. There were also black holes in the hearts of some of these remnants, and one massive (though now dormant) one at the heart of the galaxy, surrounded by an attendant shoal of doomed stars which would one day spiral into its event-horizon and fuel an apocalyptic burst of X-rays as they were ripped asunder.

But there was more to this galaxy than astrophysics. As if a new layer of memories had been quietly overlaid over her previous ones, Khouri found herself knowing something more. That the galaxy was teeming with life; a million cultures dispersed pseudo-randomly across its great slowly rotating disk.

But this was the past—the deep, deep past.

“Actually,” Fazil said, “somewhere in the region of a billion years ago. Given that the Universe is only about fifteen times older than that, that’s quite a hefty chunk of time, especially on the galactic timescale.” He was leaning over the railinged walkway next to her, as if they were a couple pausing to stare at their reflections in a dark, bread-strewn duckpond. “To give you some perspective, humanity didn’t exist a billion years ago. In fact, neither did the dinosaurs. They didn’t get around to evolving until less than two hundred million years ago; a fifth of the time we’re dealing with here. No; we’re deep into the Precambrian here. There was life on Earth, but nothing multicellular—a few sponges if you were lucky.” Fazil looked at the galaxy representation again. “But that wasn’t the case everywhere.”

The million or so cultures (although she could be infinitely precise about the number, it suddenly struck her as childishly pedantic to do so, like specifying one’s age to the nearest month) had not all arisen at the same time, nor they did all hang around for the same length of time. According to Fazil (though she understood it on some basic level) it had taken until four billion years ago for the galaxy to reach the required state at which intelligent cultures could begin to arise. But once that point of minimal galactic maturity had been reached, the cultures had not all suddenly appeared in unison. It had been a progressive emergence of intelligence, some cultures having arisen on worlds where, for one reason or another, the pace of evolutionary change was slower than the norm, or life’s ascendancy was subject to more than the usual quota of catastrophic setbacks.

But eventually—two or three billion years after life had first arisen on their homeworlds—some of these cultures had become spacefaring. When that point was reached, most cultures expanded rapidly into the galaxy, although there were always a few stay-at-homes who preferred to colonise only their own solar systems, or sometimes even just their own circum-planetary environments. But generally the pace of expansion was rapid, with a mean drift rate between one tenth and one hundredth of the speed of light. That sounded slow, but was in fact blindingly fast, given that the galaxy was billions of years old and only a hundred thousand light-years wide. Unrestricted, any of these spacefarers could have dominated the entire galaxy in the totally inconsequential time of a few tens of millions of years. And maybe if it had happened like that—a neatly imperialist domination by one power—things would have been very different.

But instead, the first culture had been at the slower end of the expansionist speed-range, and had impacted on the expansion wave of a second, younger upstart. And while younger, the second civilisation was not technologically inferior to the first, nor less capable of mustering aggression when it was required. There was what—for want of a better word—one might describe as a galactic war; a sudden sparking friction where these two swelling empires brushed against one another, grinding like vast flywheels. Soon, other ascendant cultures were embroiled in the conflict. Eventually—to one degree or another—several thousand spacefaring civilisations fell into the fray. They had many names for it, in the thousand primary languages of the combatants. Some of these names could not easily be translated into any meaningful human referent. But more than one culture called it something which might—with due allowance for the crudities of interspecies communication—be termed the Dawn War.

It was a war encompassing the entire galaxy (and the two smaller satellite galaxies which orbited the Milky Way)—one which consumed not just planets, but whole solar systems, whole star systems, whole clusters of stars, and whole spiral arms. She understood that evidence of this war was visible even now, if one knew where to look. There were anomalous concentrations of dead stars in some regions of the galaxy, and still-burning stars in odd alignments; husked components of weapons-systems light-years wide. There were voids where there ought to have been stars, and stars which—according to the accepted dynamics of solar-system formation—ought to have had worlds, but which lacked them: only rubble, cold now. The Dawn War had lasted a long, long time—longer even than the evolutionary timescale of the hottest stars. But on the timescale of the galaxy, it had indeed been mercifully brief; a transforming spasm.

It was possible that no culture emerged intact; that none of the players who entered the Dawn War actually emerged, victorious or otherwise. The lengthscale of the war, while short by galactic time, was nonetheless hideously long by species-time. It was long enough for species to self-evolve, to fragment, to coalesce with other species or assimilate them, to remake themselves beyond recognition, or even to jump from organic to machine-life substrates. Some had even made the return trip, becoming machine, then returning to the organic when it suited their purposes. Some had sublimed, vanishing from the theatre of the war entirely. Some had converted their essences to data and found immortal storage in carefully concealed computer matrices. Others had self-immolated.

Yet in the aftermath, one culture emerged stronger than the others. Possibly they had been a fortunate small-time player in the main fray, now rising to supremacy amongst the ruins. Or possibly they were the result of a coalition, a merging of several battle-weary species. It hardly mattered, and they themselves probably had no hard data on their absolute origin. They were—at least then—a hybrid machine-chimeric species, with some residual vertebrate traits. They did not bother giving themselves a name.

“Still,” Fazil said, “they acquired one, whether they liked it or not.”

Khouri looked at her husband. As he had been relating to her the story of the Dawn War, she had come to a kind of understanding about where she was, and the unreality of it all. What Fazil had said about the Mademoiselle had finally connected with some lingering memory of the true-present. She remembered the gunnery room clearly now, and knew that this place, this tampered-with shard of her past—was no more than an interlude. And this was not properly Fazil, though—because he had been resurrected from her memories—he was at least as real as the Fazil she recalled.

“What were they called?” she asked.

He waited before answering, and when he did, it was with almost theatrical gravity. “The Inhibitors. For a very good reason, which will shortly become apparent.”

And then he told her, and she knew. The Knowledge crashed home, vast and impassive as a glacier, something she could never begin to forget. And she knew something else, which was, she supposed, the whole point of this exercise. She understood why Sylveste had to die.

And why—if it took the death of a planet to ensure his death—that was an entirely reasonable price to pay.

Guards came just as Sylveste was falling into shallow dreams, exhausted by the latest operation.

“Wake up, sleepy-head,” said the taller of the two, a stocky man with a drooping grey moustache.

“What have you come for?”

“Now that would spoil the surprise,” said the other guard, a weaselly individual hefting a rifle.

The route along which they took him was clearly intended to disorientate, its convolutions too frequent to be accidental. Quickly they succeeded in their aim. The sector where they arrived was unfamiliar; either an old part of Mantell extensively refurbished by Sluka’s people, or else a completely new set of tunnel workings dug since the occupation. For a moment he wondered if he were being moved permanently to a different cell, but that seemed unlikely—they had left his other clothes in the first room, and had only just changed the bedsheets. But Falkender had spoken of the possibility of his status altering, in connection with the visitors he had mentioned, so maybe there had been a sudden change of plan.

But there been no change of plan, as he soon discovered.

The room where they left him was no less Spartan than his own; a virtual duplicate down to the same blank walling and food hatch; the same crushing sense that the walls were infinitely thick, reaching endlessly back into the mesa. So similar, in fact, that for a moment he wondered if his senses had deceived him, and all that had happened was the guards had frog-marched him in a loop which eventually returned to his own place of imprisonment. He would not have put it past them… and at least it was exercise.

But as soon as he had absorbed the room’s contents fully, he knew it was not his own. Pascale was sitting on her bed—and when she glanced up, he could tell she was just as astonished as Sylveste.

“You’ve got an hour,” the moustachioed guard said, patting his partner on the back.

And then he closed the door, Sylveste having already entered the room without their bidding.

The last time he had seen her, she had been wearing the wedding dress; her hair sculpted in brilliant purple waves, entoptics adorning her like an army of attendant fairies. He might as well have dreamt that. Now she wore overalls, as drab and shapeless as those Sylveste himself was dressed in. Her hair was a lank black bowl, eyes rouged by sleeplessness or bruising, possibly both. She looked thinner and smaller than he remembered—probably because she was hunched over, bare feet hooked under her calves, and the room’s whiteness seemed so large.

He was unable to remember a time when she had looked more fragile or beautiful; when it had been harder to believe that she was his wife. He thought back to the night of the coup, when she had waited in the dig with her patient, probing questions; questions which would later open a wound into the very core of who he was; what he had done and was capable of doing. It seemed very strange indeed that a confluence of events had brought them together, in this loneliest of rooms.

“They kept telling me you were alive,” he said. “But I don’t think I ever really believed them.”

“They told me you’d been hurt,” Pascale said, her voice quiet, as if she dared not shatter a dream by speaking aloud. “They wouldn’t say what—and I didn’t want to ask too much—in case they told me the truth.”

“They blinded me,” Sylveste said, touching the hard surface of his eyes; the first time he had done so since the surgery. Instead of the little nova of pain to which he had become accustomed there was only a vague fog of discomfort which faded as soon as he removed his fingers.

“But you can see now?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact you’re the first thing it’s been worth having sight for.”

And then she rose from the bed, slipping into his arms, hooking a leg round his own. He felt her lightness and delicacy; was almost afraid to return her embrace in case he crushed her. Yet he drew her nearer, and she reciprocated, seemingly just as nervous of damaging him, as if the two of them were spectres uncertain of each other’s reality. They held each other for what seemed like many more hours than the one they had been allocated; not because time dragged, but because for now time was unimportant; it was in abeyance, and it seemed as if it could be held that way by the act of will alone. Sylveste drank in the vision of her face; her eyes found something human even in the blankness of his own. There had been a time when Pascale had lacked the courage to look at him face-on, let alone stare into his eyes—but that time had long passed. And for Sylveste, gazing into Pascale’s eyes had never been difficult, since she need never be aware of his scrutiny. Now, though, he wished she could tell when he was staring; wished her the vicarious pleasure of knowing that he found her intoxicating.

Soon they were kissing, and then they slumped awkwardly to the bed. In a moment they were free of their Mantell clothes, shucking them in drab heaps beside the bed. Sylveste wondered if they were being observed. It seemed possible—likely even. It also seemed possible not to care. For now—for as long as this hour lasted—he and Pascale were absolutely alone; the room’s walls really infinite; the room the only open enclosure in the whole universe. It was not the first time they had made love, though the previous occasions had been rare indeed; in those few instances when the opportunity for privacy had arisen. Now—the thought almost made Sylveste laugh—they were married, and there was even less need for any subterfuge. And yet here they were again, once more snatching what intimacy they could. He felt an edge of guilt, and for a long time he wondered where it came from. Eventually, as they lay together, his head buried softly in her chest, he realised why he felt that way. Because there was so much to speak about, and instead they had squandered their time in the fevered archaeology of their bodies. But it had to be that way, Sylveste knew.

“I wish there was longer,” he said, when his sense of time had returned to something like normality, and he began to wonder how much of the hour remained.

“The last time we spoke,” Pascale said, “you told me something.”

“About Carine Lefevre, yes. It was something I had to tell you, do you understand? It sounds ridiculous, but I thought I was going to die. I had to tell you; tell anyone. It was something I’d kept inside me for years.”

Pascale’s thigh was a cool pressure against his own. She drew her hand across his chest, mapping it. “Whatever happened out there, there’s no way I or anyone else can begin to judge you.”

“It was cowardice.”

“No, it wasn’t. Just instinct. You were in the most terrifying place in the universe, Dan, don’t forget that. Philip Lascaille went there without a Juggler transform—look what happened to him. That you stayed sane at all was a kind of bravery. Insanity would have been a lot easier on you.”

“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.”

“Damn,” Volyova said, quietly and calmly. “There’s a slight flaw in my plan. The weapon must have hit the spider-room with some kind of defensive EM-pulse; either that or the radiation from the drive is interfering with the hardware.” There was the sound—possibly—of someone making repeated attempts to throw antique metal switches on a console. “What I mean,” Volyova said, “is that I don’t seem to be able to break free. I’m stuck to the bastard.”

“Then shut off the damned drive—you can do that, can’t you?”

“Of course; how do you think I killed Nagorny?” But she didn’t sound optimistic. “Nyet—I’m locked out of the drive; must have blocked my intercession pathways when I ran Palsy…” She was practically gabbling now. “Khouri, this is getting a tiny bit desperate… if you have those weapons…”

The Mademoiselle spoke now, sounding appropriately smug. “She’s dead, Khouri. And at the angle you’d now have to fire, half those weapons would be disabled to prevent them inflicting damage on the ship. You’ll be lucky to scorch the cache-weapon’s hull with what remains.”

She was right—almost without Khouri noticing, whole blocks of potentially available armament had safed themselves, since she was now requesting them to point dangerously close to critical ship components. What remained were the lightest armaments, almost by definition incapable of doing any serious damage.

Perhaps sensing this, something relented.

The weapons were suddenly more under Khouri’s control than not, and—she realised—the fact that the remaining systems were limited in their firepower was actually to her advantage. Her plan had changed. What she needed now was surgical precision, not brute force.

In the hiatus, before the weapons were regained by the Mademoiselle, Khouri ditched the prior target pattern and issued re-aiming orders. Her instructions were specific in the extreme. Now, oozing into position as if immersed in toffee, the weapons aligned themselves on the impact points she had selected. Not the cache-weapon now, but something else entirely…

“Khouri,” the Mademoiselle began, “I really think you should consider this…”

But by then Khouri had already fired.

Gouts of plasma streamed out towards the cache-weapon connecting—not with the weapon itself, but with the spider-room, neatly severing all eight of its legs, and then all four of its grapple-lines. The room flung itself away from the lancing spear of the drive, its legs truncated abruptly at the knees.

The cache-weapon drifted into the beam, like a moth brushing into an incandescent lamp.

What happened thereafter took place in an inhumanly brief series of instants; almost too rapid for Khouri to comprehend until afterwards. The physical exterior of the cache-weapon evaporated in a millisecond, boiling away in a gasp of predominantly metallic vapour. It was impossible to tell whether it was the touching of the beam which led to what followed, or whether, at the instant of its destruction, the cache-weapon was already committed to the act of turning itself inside out.

Either way, things did not proceed quite as its builders had intended.

Simultaneously—or as near as mattered—what was left of the cache-weapon beneath its eviscerated hide emitted a prolonged gravitational eruction, a burp of shearing spacetime. Something very horrible was happening to the fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the weapon, but not in the way which had been planned. A rainbow of bent starlight flickered around the curdling mass of plasma-energy. For a millisecond the rainbow was approximately spherical and stable, but then it began to wobble, oscillating unevenly like a soap-bubble on the point of bursting. A fraction of a millisecond later, it collapsed inwards, and accelerating exponentially, vanished.

For another moment there was nothing left, not even debris, just the normal star-speckled backdrop of space.

Then a glint of light appeared, shading to ultraviolet. The glint magnified and swelled, bloating into an intense, malignant sphere. The wave of expanding plasma hit the ship, juddering it so violently that Khouri felt the impact even with the cushioning gimbals of the gunnery. Data rushed in, telling her—not that she was particularly keen on knowing—that the blast had not seriously compromised any hull-based systems, and that the brief spike of background radiation from the flash was within tolerable norms. Gravimetric scans had abruptly returned to normal.

Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies present in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.

The cache-weapon had malfunctioned, badly.

“Oh, very good,” the Mademoiselle said, sounding more disappointed than anything. “I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done.”

But what had Khouri’s attention now was the absence streaking towards her, rushing through gunspace. She tried to back out in time; tried to disengage the link—

But she was not quite fast enough.