Revelation Space

THIRTY

When they were at last alone in their quarters, Pascale said, “You can’t go through with this, Dan. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He was tired; they all were, but with his mind racing, the last thing he felt like now was sleep. Still, if the bridgehead survived long enough for his entry into Cerberus to proceed as planned, now might be the last opportunity he had for proper sleep for tens of hours; perhaps even days. He would need to be functioning as keenly as he ever had in his life when he descended beneath the alien world. Yet now, obviously, Pascale was going to do her best to talk him out of it.

“It’s far too late now,” he said, wearily. “We’ve already announced ourselves; done harm to Cerberus. The world knows of our presence; already knows something of our nature. My entering it won’t make much difference now, except that I’ll learn much more than Volyova’s clunking spy robots will ever tell me.”

“You can’t know what’s waiting for you down there, Dan.”

“Yes, I can. An answer to what happened to the Amarantin. Can’t you see that humanity needs to have that information?”

He could see that she did, if only on some theoretical level. But she said, “What if it was the same kind of curiosity you’re showing now that brought extinction upon them? You saw what happened to the Lorean.”

Once again he thought of Alicia, dying in that attack. What exactly was it that had made him so unwilling to spare the time that would have been needed to recover her body from the wreck? Even now, the way he had ordered that she go down with the bridgehead struck him as chillingly impersonal, as if—for a fleeting instant—it had not been him giving that order; not even Calvin, but something hiding behind both of them. The thought made him flinch, so he crushed it beneath conscious concern, the way one crushed an insect.

“Then we’ll know, won’t we?” he said. “Finally, we’ll know. And even if it kills us, someone else will know what happened—someone on Resurgam, or even in another system. You have to understand, Pascale, that I think it’s worth that kind of risk.”

“There’s more to it than just curiosity, isn’t there?” She looked at him, obviously expecting some kind of answer. He just looked back at her, knowing how intimidating the lack of focus of his gaze could be, until she continued speaking. “Khouri was put aboard to kill you. She even admitted as much. Volyova said she was sent here by someone who might have been Carine Lefevre.”

“That’s not only impossible, it’s insulting.”

“But it still might be the truth. And there might be more to it than just a personal vendetta, too. Maybe Lefevre did die, after all, but something assumed her shape, inherited her body, or whatever—something that knows the danger you’re playing with. Can’t you at least accept that as a remote possibility?”

“Nothing that happened around Lascaille’s Shroud can have any bearing on what happened to the Amarantin.”

“How can you be so damned sure?”

Angry now, he said, “Because I was there! Because I went where Lascaille went, into Revelation Space, and what they’d shown Lascaille, they showed to me.” He tried to calm his voice, taking both of Pascale’s hands in his own. “They were ancient; so alien they made me shiver. They touched my mind. I saw them… and they were nothing like the Amarantin.”

For the first time since leaving Resurgam, he thought back to that instant of screaming comprehension, as his damaged contact module had skirted the Shroud. Old as fossils, the Shrouders’ minds had crawled into his; a moment of abyssal knowing. What Lascaille had said was true. They might have been alien in their biology, inspiring a kind of visceral revulsion simply because they were so far from what the human mind considered the right and proper form for sentience, but in the dynamics of their thought, they were a lot closer to people than their shapes would ever have implied. For a moment, the strangeness of that dichotomy troubled him… but it could not have been otherwise, for how else could the Pattern Jugglers have wired his mind to think like a Shrouder, if the basic modes of thought were not similar? Then he remembered the festering queasiness of their communion—and a spillage of memory crashing over him, a glimpse of the vastness of Shrouder history. Across millions of years, they had scoured a younger galaxy than the present one, hunting down and collecting the discarded and dangerous playthings of other, even older, civilisations. Now those fabulous things were almost within reach; behind the membrane of the Shroud… and he had almost tricked his way inside. And then something else…

Something parting, momentarily, like a curtain, or a gap in clouds—something so fleeting, he had almost forgotten it until the present moment. Something revealed to him that should have remained hidden—hidden behind layers of identity. The identity and memories of a long-dead race… worn as camouflage…

And something else entirely within the Shroud; and another reason entirely for its existence…

But the recollection itself seemed elusive, seemed to slip out of mental reach, until he was left again with Pascale, and only the aftertaste of doubt.

“Promise me you won’t go,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” Sylveste said.

He woke in his quarters, the little sleep he had snatched insufficient to purge fatigue from his blood.

Something had stirred him awake, but for a moment he could not see or hear any disturbance. Then Sylveste noticed that the bedside holo screen was glowing palely, like a mirror turned to moonlight.

He moved to activate the link, taking care not to wake Pascale. Not that there seemed any danger of that; she was sleeping soundly. The discussion they had shared before sleeping seemed to have given her the mental calm she needed for that.

Sajaki’s face appeared on the holo, backdropped by the apparatus of the clinic. “Are you alone?” he asked, softly.

“My wife is here,” Sylveste said, whispering. “She’s sleeping.”

“Then I’ll be brief.” He held up his damaged hand for inspection, revealing how the glistening caul had now filled out, returning his wrist to its normal profile, although the caul still glowed with subcutaneous industry. “I am well enough to leave here. But I have no intention of duplicating Hegazi’s current predicament.”

“Then you’ve got a problem. Volyova and Khouri have all the weapons, and they’ve made sure we won’t get our hands on any more.” He lowered his voice even further. “I don’t think it would take much to persuade her to lock me up as well. My threats against the ship don’t seem to have impressed her.”

“She’s assuming you’d never go that far.”

“What if she’s right?”

Sajaki shook his head.

“None of this matters any more. In a matter of days—five at the most—her weapon will begin to fail. You have that window in which to get inside. And don’t pretend that her little robots will teach you anything.”

“I know that much already.”

Next to him Pascale stirred.

“Then accept this proposition,” Sajaki said. “I will lead you inside. The two of us; no one else. We can take two suits, of the same type that brought you here from Resurgam. We don’t even need a ship. We’ll reach Cerberus in less than a day. That gives you two days to get in, a day to look around and then a day to leave the way you came in. By which time of course you will know the route.”

“What about you?”

“I accompany you. I told you already how I believe we should proceed with the Captain.”

Sylveste nodded. “You think you’ll find something inside Cerberus; something that can heal him.”

“I have to start somewhere.”

Sylveste looked around. Sajaki’s voice had been like the wind stirring trees, and the room seemed preternaturally still; more like a tableau glimpsed through a magic lantern than anything real. He thought of the fury taking place on Cerberus at that very moment; the fury of clashing machines, even if they were, for the most part, smaller than bacteria; and the din of their conflict inaudible to any human senses. But it was happening and Sajaki was right: they had only days before the numberless machines owing allegiance to Cerberus would begin to erode Volyova’s mighty siege engine. Every second he delayed entering that place was a second less he would have to spend inside it, and a second which would make his eventual return take place that much closer to the end; that much more hazardous, since by then the bridge would be closing. Pascale stirred again, but he sensed that she was still deep in dream. She seemed no more present than the interlocked birds which mosaicked the room’s walls; no more capable of being quickened to wakefulness.

“It’s all very sudden,” he said.

“But you’ve waited for this moment all your life,” Sajaki said, his voice rising. “Don’t tell me you’re not ready to seize it. Don’t tell me you’re scared of what you might find.”

Sylveste knew he had to make a decision before the true alienness of the moment had registered.

“Where do I meet you?”

“We’ll meet outside the ship,” Sajaki said, and then explained why it had to be that way; why it was too risky for them to meet, because then Sajaki would run the risk of meeting Volyova or Khouri, or even Sylveste’s wife. “They still think I’m ill,” Sajaki added, rubbing the membrane casing his wounded wrist. “But if they find me outside the clinic, they’ll do to me what they did to Hegazi. But from here, I can reach a suit in a few minutes, without entering any areas of the ship still capable of registering my presence.”

“And me?”

“Go to the nearest elevator. I’ll arrange for it to take you to a suit nearer to you. You don’t have to do anything. The suit will take care of everything.”

“Sajaki, I…”

“Just be outside in ten minutes. Your suit will bring you to me.” Sajaki smiled before signing off. “And I strongly advise that you don’t wake your wife.”

Sajaki was true to his word: the elevator and the suit both seemed to know exactly where it was that Sylveste had to go. He met no one during his journey, and no one troubled him as the suit measured him, adjusted itself and then folded affectionately around him.

There was no indication that the ship even noticed as the airlock opened; still less as he reached space.

Volyova was startled awake, interrupted from monochromatic dreams of raging insect armies.

Khouri was banging on her door, shouting something, though Volyova was too bleary to make it out. When she opened the door she was looking down the barrel of the leatherclad plasma-rifle. Khouri hesitated for a fraction of a second before lowering it, as if unsure just what she had been expecting beyond the door.

“What is it?” Volyova asked.

“It’s Pascale,” Khouri said, sweat beading her forehead, shining in slick patches around the gun’s grips. “She woke up and Sylveste wasn’t there.”

“Wasn’t there?”

“He’d left this. She’s pretty cut up about it, but she wanted me to show it to you.” Khouri let the gun drop in its sling and fished out a sheet of paper from her pocket.

Volyova rubbed her eyes and took the paper. Tactile contact activated its stored message; Sylveste’s face appeared on it, sketched darkly against a background of interlocking birds.

“I’m afraid I’ve lied to you,” he said, his voice buzzing from the paper. “Pascale, I’m sorry—you’re entitled to hate me for this, but I hope you won’t; not after what we went through.” His voice was very low now. “You asked me to promise I wouldn’t go into Cerberus. But I’m going, and by the time you read this I’ll be well on my way, far too late to stop. There’s no justification I can give for this, except it’s something I have to do, and I think it’s something you’ve always known I would do, if we ever got this close.” He paused, either to draw breath or think what he would say next. “Pascale, you were the only one who guessed what really happened around Lascaille’s Shroud. I admired you for that, you know. That was why I wasn’t afraid to admit the truth to you. I swear, what I told you was the way I thought it happened; not just another lie. But now this woman—Khouri—says that she has been sent by someone who might have been Carine Lefevre, and that she’s been sent to kill me because of what I might do.”

Again the paper was silent for a moment.

“I acted as if I didn’t believe a word of it, Pascale, and maybe that was how I thought at the time. But I have to put those ghosts to rest; finally convince myself that none of this has any connection to what happened back around the Shroud.

“You understand that, don’t you? I have to go this extra mile, just so I can silence these phantoms. Perhaps I owe Khouri thanks for that. She’s given me a reason to take this step, when my fear of what I’ll find is the greatest I’ve known. I don’t believe she—or any of them—are bad people. And not you, either, Pascale. I know you were persuaded by what they said, but that wasn’t your fault. You tried to talk me out of it because you love me. And what I was doing—what I was going to do—hurt me more, because I knew I was betraying that love.

“Does that make any sense to you? And will you be able to forgive me when I get back? It won’t be long, Pascale—no more than five days; maybe a lot less.” He paused again, before adding a final postscript: “I took Calvin with me. He’s in me now, as I speak. I’d be lying if we said that the two of us haven’t come to a new… equilibrium. I think he’ll prove of value to me.”

And then the image on the paper faded.

“You know,” Khouri said, “there have been moments when he almost had my sympathy. But I think he’s just blown it.”

“You said Pascale had taken it badly.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“It depends. Maybe he was right: maybe she always knew it would come to this. Maybe she should have thought twice before marrying the svinoi.”

“You think he’s got far?”

Volyova looked at the paper again, as if hoping to siphon fresh wisdom from its wrinkles.

“He must have had assistance. There aren’t many of us left who could have helped him. No one, really, if you discount Sajaki.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have discounted him. Perhaps his medichines healed him faster than we expected.”

“No,” Volyova said. She tapped her magic bracelet. “I know where the Triumvirate is at any moment. Hegazi’s still in the airlock; Sajaki’s in the clinic.”

“You mind if we check on them, just in case?”

Volyova grabbed another layer of clothing, warm enough that she could enter any of the pressurised parts of the ship without catching hypothermia. She slipped the needler into her belt, then slung over one shoulder the heavy ordnance Khouri had obtained from the warchive. It was a dual-gripped hypervelocity sports slug-gun from the twenty-third century; a product of the first Europan Demarchy, clad in curving black neoprene, ruby-eyed Chinese dragons in beaten gold and silver worked into the sides.

“Not in the slightest,” she said.

They reached the airlock where Hegazi had been waiting all this time, with nothing to amuse himself but the contemplation of his reflection in the chamber’s burnished steel walls. That at least was how Volyova imagined it, in the rare moments when she bothered to give the imprisoned Triumvir any thought at all. She did not really hate Hegazi, or even particularly dislike him. He was too weak for that; too obviously a creature incapable of dwelling anywhere except in Sajaki’s shadow.

“Did he give you any trouble?” Volyova asked.

“Not really, except that he kept protesting his innocence; saying it wasn’t him who had released Sun Stealer from the gunnery. Sounded like he meant it as well.”

“It’s an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.”

Volyova shrugged back the Chinese-dragon gun and landed her fists on the handle which would open the airlock inner door. Her feet were already planted apart in the sludge.

She struggled.

“I can’t open it.”

“Let me try.” Khouri pushed her gently aside and tried to work the handle. “No,” she said, after grunting and then relenting. “It’s jammed tight. I can’t move it.”

“You didn’t weld it shut or anything like that?”

“Yes, stupid me, I forgot.”

Volyova knuckled the door. “Hegazi, you hear me? What have you done to the door? It won’t open.”

There was no answer.

“He’s in there,” Volyova said, consulting her bracelet again. “But maybe he can’t hear us through the armour.”

“I don’t like this,” Khouri said. “There was nothing wrong with that door when I left it. I think we should shoot the lock.” Without waiting for Volyova’s agreement, she said, “Hegazi? If you can hear this, we’re shooting our way in.”

In a flash she had the plasma-rifle in one hand, its weight drawing the muscles taut in her forearm. She was shielding her face with the other hand, looking away.

“Wait,” Volyova said. “We’re being too hasty. What if the outer door is open? The vacuum would trip the pressure-sensors and lock the inner door.”

“If that’s the case, Hegazi isn’t going to be causing us any more problems. Not unless he can hold his breath for a few hours.”

“Granted—but we still don’t want to put a hole in that door.”

Khouri moved closer.

If there was a panel showing the pressure status beyond the door, it was well-concealed behind the grime.

“I can set the beam to its narrowest collimation. Put a needle-hole in the door.”

“Do it,” Volyova said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“Change of plan, Hegazi. Gonna put a hole in the top of the door. If you’re standing up, now would be a good time to sit down, maybe think about putting your affairs in order.”

There was still no answer.

It was almost an insult to the plasma-rifle to ask it to do this, Volyova thought—too precise and dainty an operation by far, like using an industrial laser to cut a wedding cake. But Khouri did it anyway. There was a flash and a crack, as the gun spat a tiny elongated seed of ball-lightning into the door. For a moment smoke coiled from the woodworm-sized hole which she had cut.

But only for a second.

Then something spurted from the door, in a dark hissing arc.

She wasted no time putting a bigger hole in the door. By then, neither Khouri nor Volyova considered it very likely that there was going to be anyone living behind the airlock. Either Hegazi was dead—and there was no guessing how—or Hegazi had already left the lock, and this jetting stream of high-pressure fluid was his perplexing idea of a message to his former captors.

Khouri shot through, and the stream became an arm-thick eruption of the brackish fluid, ramming out with such explosive force that she was thrown backwards into the ship-sludge underfoot, plasma-rifle clattering into the same pool of ankle-deep effluent. The stuff hissed fiercely as it touched the gun’s hot maw. By the time she had struggled to her feet, however, the flow had dwindled to a dribble, slurping in noisy eructions through the punctured door. She picked up the gun and shook the muck off it, wondering if it would work again.

“It’s ship-slime,” Volyova said. “The same stuff we’re standing in. I’d recognise that stench anywhere.”

“The lock was full of ship-slime?”

“Don’t ask me how. Just open a bigger hole in the door.”

Khouri did so, until she could squeeze her arm through and work the lock’s interior controls without brushing against the plasma-heated edges of the cut metal. Volyova was right, she thought, it had been the pressure switches which had tripped the locking mechanism. The chamber must have been pumped to bursting with ship-slime.

The door opened, allowing a final slick of slime to ooze into the corridor.

Along with what remained of Hegazi. It was unclear whether this stemmed from the pressure he had been subjected to, or its explosive release, but his metal and flesh components seemed to have arrived at a less than amicable separation.