Revelation Space

THIRTY-SEVEN

The final shell was hollow.

It had taken him three days to reach it; a day since he had left Sajaki’s bodyless suit on the floor of the third shell, more than five hundred kilometres above him now. If he stopped to think about those distances, he knew, he would go quietly mad, so he carefully quarantined them from his thoughts. Simply being in an entirely alien environment was troubling enough; he did not wish to compound his fear with an additional dose of claustrophobia. Yet his quarantining was not complete, so that behind every thought there was a nagging background of crushing fright, the thought that at any instant some action he did would cause the delicate equilibria of this place to shift catastrophically, bringing down that vast, impossible ceiling.

With each inward layer he seemed to pass through a subtly different phase of Amarantin construction methodology. History, too, he supposed—but nothing was ever that simple. The levels did not seem to get systematically more or less advanced as he penetrated deeper, but rather evinced different philosophies; different approaches. It was as if the first Amarantin to arrive here had found something (what, he had not yet begun to guess) and had taken the decision to englobe it in an artificial shell armoured and capable of defending itself. Then another group must have arrived and elected to englobe that, perhaps because they believed their fortifications were more secure. The last of all had taken the process one logical step further, by camouflaging their fortifications so that they did not resemble anything artificial at all. It was impossible to guess over what timescales this layering had taken place, so he studiously avoided doing so. Maybe the different layers had been emplaced almost simultaneously—or perhaps the process had been drawn out over the thousands of years between Sun Stealer’s departure with the Banished Ones, and his godlike return.

Naturally, he had been less than comforted by what he found in Sajaki’s suit.

“He was never there,” Calvin said, filling in his thoughts. “All the while you thought he was in the suit, he wasn’t. The suit was empty. No wonder he never let you get too close.”

“Sneaky bastard.”

“I’ll say. But it wasn’t actually Sajaki being a sneaky bastard, was it?”

Sylveste was desperately trying to find another way to explain this paradox, but was failing at every attempt. “But if not Sajaki…” He trailed off, remembering how he had not actually seen the Triumvir in person before they departed the ship. Sajaki had called him from the clinic, but he had no reason to believe that had really been Sajaki.

“Listen, something was driving that suit until it crashed.” Calvin was doing his favourite trick of sounding absurdly calm, despite the situation. But he lacked the usual bravado. “I’d say there’s only one logical culprit.”

“Sun Stealer.” Sylveste said the words experimentally, testing the idea for its repulsiveness. It was no less bitter than he had imagined it would be. “It was him, wasn’t it? Khouri had it right all along.”

“I’d say that at this juncture we’d be staggeringly foolish to reject that hypothesis. Do you want me to continue?”

“No,” Sylveste said. “Not just yet. Give me a moment to think things through, then you can inflict all the pious wisdom on me you see fit.”

“What’s there to think through?”

“I’d have thought it was obvious. Whether we go on or not.”

The decision had not been one of the simpler ones in his life. Now he knew that, for all or part of this, he had been manipulated. How deep had that manipulation gone? Had it extended to his very powers of reason? Had his thought processes been subjugated towards this one end for most of his life in fact, since returning from Lascaille’s Shroud? Had he really died out there, and returned to Yellowstone as some kind of automaton, acting and feeling like his old self, but really directed towards one goal only, which was now on the point of being achieved? And did it honestly matter?

After all, no matter which way he cut it, no matter how false these feelings were, no matter how irrational the logic, this was the place he had always wanted to be.

He could not go back; not yet.

Not until he knew.

“Svinoi pig-dog,” Volyova said.

The first graser burst had hit the nose of the shuttle thirty seconds after the tactical attack siren had begun to shriek; barely enough time to throw off a cloud of ablative chaff, designed to dissipate the initial energies of the incoming gamma-ray photons. Just before the flightdeck windows rendered themselves opaque, Volyova saw a silver flash, as sacrificial hull armour vanished in a gasp of excited metal ions. The structural shock rammed through the fuselage like a concussion charge. More sirens joined in the threnody, and a vast acreage of the tactical display switched over to offensive mode, graphing up weapons readiness data.

Useless; all of it useless. The Melancholia’s defences were simply too small-scale, too short-range, to have any chance against the pursuing megatonnage of the lighthugger. Hardly surprising; some of the Infinity’s guns were larger than the shuttle, and those were probably the ones that it had not yet bothered deploying.

Cerberus was a grey immensity, filling a third of the sky from the shuttle’s perspective. By now they should be decelerating, yet they were busy wasting precious seconds being fried. Even if they fought off the attack, they would be moving uncomfortably fast…

More of the hull vaporised.

She let her fingers do the talking, typing in a programmed evasive pattern that would undoubtedly get them out of the immediate focus of the graser onslaught. The only trouble was, it depended on sustaining thrust at ten gees.

She executed the routine, and almost immediately blacked out.

The chamber was hollow, but not empty.

Three hundred kilometres wide, Sylveste guessed it to be, though that was sheer guesswork, because his suit radar stubbornly refused to come up with a consistent distance for the diameter of the chamber, no matter how many readings he asked it to make. No doubt what was in the middle of the chamber was causing his suit difficulty. He could understand that. The thing was causing him difficulty as well, though in perhaps not quite the same way. It was giving him a headache.

In fact, there were two of them, and he wasn’t sure which was the stranger. They were moving, or rather one of them was, locked in orbit around the other. The one that moved was like a gem, but it was a gem so complicated, and so constantly in flux, that it was impossible to describe its shape, or even its colour and lustre from moment to moment. All he knew was that it was large—tens of kilometres wide, it seemed—but again, when he asked the suit to confirm this, it was unable to give him a coherent reply. He might as well have asked the suit to comment on the subtext of a piece of free-form haiku, for all the sense it gave him.

He tried to enlarge it with his eyes’ zoom faculty, but it seemed to defy enlargement, if anything growing smaller when he examined it under magnification. Something seriously strange had happened to spacetime in the vicinity of that jewel.

Next, he tried to record a snapshot of it using his eyes’ image capture facility, but that failed as well, and what the image showed was something paradoxically more blurred than what he appeared to see in realtime, as if the object were changing more rapidly on small timescales—more thoroughly—than on timescales of seconds or longer. He tried to hold this concept in his head and for a moment thought he might have succeeded, but the illusion of understanding was only fleeting.

And the other thing…

The other thing, the stationary thing… if anything, this was worse.

It was like a gash in reality, a gaping hole from which erupted white light from the mouth of infinity. The light was intense, more intense and pure than any he had known or dreamt of—like the light which the near-dead spoke of, beckoning them to the afterlife. He too felt the light was beckoning. It was so bright he should have been blinded. But the more he looked into its fulgent depths, the less it seemed to glare; the more it became only a tranquil, fathomless whiteness.

The light refracted through the orbiting gem, casting varicoloured, constantly shifting slabs of illumination on the chamber walls. It was beautiful; intense and ever-shifting, beguiling.

“At this point,” Calvin said, “I think a little humility may be in order. You’re impressed, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” If he spoke, he did not hear his own words. But Calvin seemed to understand.

“And this is enough, isn’t it? I mean, now you know what it was they had to conceal from us. Something so strange… God only knows what it is…”

“Perhaps that’s just what it is. God.”

“Staring into that light, I almost believe you.”

“You feel it too, is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not sure what I feel. I’m not sure I like it, either.”

Sylveste said, “Do you think they made this, or was it something they happened to find?”

“This is a first—you asking my opinion.” Calvin seemed to deliberate, but his answer was hardly surprising when it came. “They never made this, Dan. They were clever—maybe even cleverer than us. But the Amarantin were never gods.”

“Someone else, then.”

“Someone I hope we never meet.”

“Then hold your breath, because for all I know, we’re about to.”

Weightless, he jetted the suit into the chamber, towards the dancing jewel and the source of searingly beautiful light.

When Volyova came around, it was to the sound of the radar warning siren, which meant that the Infinity was preparing to re-aim its grasers. It would not take it more than a few seconds to do so, even allowing for her random-walk evasive manoeuvre. She glanced at the hull health indicator and saw that they were down to only a few remaining millimetres of sacrificial metal, that the chaff throwers were depleted, and that—realistically—they could withstand no more than one or two additional bursts of graser-strike.

“Are we still here?” Khouri asked, seemingly astonished that she was even capable of framing the question.

One more strike and the hull would start outgassing in a dozen places, if it did not spontaneously vaporise. It was hot now; noticeably. The heat of the first few sweeps had been efficiently dissipated, but the last one had not been so easily parried, and its lethal warming energies had seeped inwards.

“Get to the spider-room,” Volyova shouted, momentarily throttling down the thrust to permit locomotion around the ship. “The insulation will enable you to survive another few strikes.”

“No!” Khouri was shouting now. “We can’t! At least here we’ve got a chance!”

“She’s right,” Pascale said.

“You’ll still have one in the spider-room,” Volyova said. “Better, in fact. It’s a smaller target, for one. I’m guessing the ship will direct its weapons against the shuttle in preference, or it may not even realise that the spider-room is anything but wreckage.”

“But what about you?”

She was angry now. “Do you think I’m the type to indulge in heroics, Khouri? I’m coming too; with or without you. But I have to program a flight pattern into the shuttle first—unless you think you can do it.”

Khouri hesitated, as if the idea was not totally absurd. Then she unbuckled from her couch, jabbed a thumb towards Pascale and began moving, as if her life depended on it.

Which, rationally, it probably did.

Volyova did what she had promised she would do, inputting the most hair-raising evasive pattern she could imagine, one that she was not even sure she or her companions would be capable of surviving, with peak bursts exceeding fifteen gees for whole seconds. But did it really matter now? Somehow, the idea of dying while already unconscious, in the warm, muggy torpor of gee-induced blackout, was preferable to being burned alive, in vacuum, in the invisible heat of gamma-rays.

Grabbing the helmet she had worn when she boarded the shuttle, she prepared to join the others, mentally counting down until the initiation of the evasive pattern.

Khouri was halfway across to the waiting spider-room when she felt the wave of heat slap across her face, followed by the dreadful sound of the hull giving up its final ghost. The illumination in the cargo bay was gone now, as the Melancholia’s energy grid collapsed under the onslaught of the attack. But the spider-room’s interior was still powered up, its implausibly plush decor visible through the observation windows.

“Get in!” she shouted to Pascale, and although the noise of the ship’s death-throes was now tremendous, like a concerto played on scrap metal, somehow Sylveste’s wife heard what she said and clambered into the spider-room, just as a tremendous shock wave slammed through the hull (or what remained of it), and the spider-room exploded free of the moorings in which it had been locked by Volyova’s servitors.

Now there was a terrible howl of escaping air from elsewhere in the shuttle, and suddenly Khouri felt it tug against her, resisting her forward progress. The spider-room twisted and turned, its legs thrashing wildly, randomly. She could see Pascale now, in the observation window, but there was nothing the woman could do to help; she understood the room’s controls even less comprehensively than Khouri.

She looked behind, hoping and praying that she would see Volyova there, having followed them, and that she would know what to do, but there was nothing except empty access corridor, and that awful sucking stream of escaping air.

“Ilia…”

The damned fool had done just what they’d feared; stayed behind, for all that she had denied that she would.

With what little light remained, she saw the hull quiver, like a sounding-board. And then suddenly the gale that was pulling her away from the spider-room lost its strength; counter-balanced by an equally fierce decompression halfway across the cargo bay. She looked towards it, eyes already veiling over as the cold hit them, and then she was falling towards the gap where only a second earlier there had been metal—

“Where the—”

But almost as soon as she had opened her mouth, Khouri knew where she was, which was inside the spider-room. There was no mistaking the place; not after all the time she had spent in it. And it felt comfortable; warm and safe and silent; a universe away from where she had been up to the point when she could not remember anything more. Her hands hurt; hurt rather a lot, in fact—but apart from that, she felt better than she imagined she had any right to feel; not when her last memory had been of falling towards naked space, from the womb of a dying ship…

“We made it,” Pascale said, although something in her voice sounded anything but triumphant, “Don’t try to move; not just yet—you’ve burnt your hands rather badly.”

“Burnt them?” Khouri was lying on one of the velvet couches which stretched along either wall of the room, head against the curved cushioned-brass end-piece. “What happened?”

“You hit the spider-room; the draught pulled you towards it. I don’t know how, but you managed to climb around the outside to the airlock. You were breathing vacuum for five or six seconds at least. The metal cooled so quickly that you got frost-burns where your hands touched it.”

“I don’t remember any of that.” But she only had to look at the evidence of her palms to see that it must have been true.

“You blacked out as soon as you came aboard. I don’t blame you.”

There was still that utterly uncelebratory tone in her voice, as if all that Khouri had done had been pointless. And Khouri thought: she was probably right. The best that could happen to them was that they would somehow find a way to land the spider-room on Cerberus, and then see how long they could take their chances against the crustal defences. It would be interesting, if nothing else. And if not that, she supposed, then a slow wait until either the lighthugger found them and picked them off, or they died of cold or asphyxia, when their reserves expired. She racked her memory, trying to recall how long Volyova had said the spider-room was capable of surviving on its own.

“Ilia…”

“She didn’t make it in time,” Pascale said. “She died. I saw it happen. The second you were aboard, the shuttle just exploded.”

“You think Volyova made it happen deliberately, so that we’d at least have a chance? So we’d be mistaken for wreckage, as she said?”

“If so, I suppose we owe her thanks.”

Khouri slipped off her jacket, removed her shirt, slipped her jacket back on again and then tore the shirt into narrow strips with which she then bound her black, blistered palms. They hurt like hell, but it was nothing worse than the kind of pain she had known during training, from rope burns or carrying heavy artillery. She gritted her teeth and, while acknowledging it, put the pain somewhere beyond her immediate concerns.

Which, now she had to focus on them, made the prospect of submerging herself in the pain somewhat more tempting. But she resisted. She had to at least acknowledge her predicament, even if there was nothing obvious she could do about it. She had to know how it was going to happen, as it surely would.

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

Pascale Sylveste nodded. “But not the way you’re thinking, I’m willing to bet.”

“You mean we don’t land on Cerberus?”

“No; not even if we knew how to operate this thing. We’re not going to hit it either, and I think our velocity’s too high for us to go into any kind of orbit around it.”

Now that Pascale mentioned it, the hemisphere of Cerberus through the observation windows looked further away than it had appeared prior to the attack against the shuttle. They must have slammed past the world with the velocity which had not been negated from the shuttle’s approach pattern, hundreds of kilometres a second.

“So what happens now?”

“I’m only guessing,” Pascale said, “but I think we’re falling towards Hades.” She nodded at the forward observation window, at the pinprick of red light ahead of them. “It seems to be in roughly the right direction, doesn’t it?”

Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept well away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height. It was not even necessary to get close to suffer those crushing forces.

A few hundred thousand kilometres would be more than sufficient.

“Yes,” Khouri said. “I think you’re right. And that’s not good.”

“No,” Pascale said. “I rather imagined it wasn’t.”