Revelation Space

EIGHT

“I take it you’ve heard the news concerning the Captain,” Khouri said, when the Mademoiselle coughed discreetly from behind her. Other than the Mademoiselle’s illusory presence, she was alone in her quarters, digesting what Volyova and Sajaki had told her of the mission.

The Mademoiselle’s smile was patient. “Rather complicates matters, doesn’t it? I’ll admit I considered the possibility that the crew might have some connection with him. It seemed logical, given their intention of travelling to Resurgam. But I never extrapolated anything this convoluted.”

“I suppose that’s one word for it.”

“Their relationship is…” the ghost seemed to take a moment to choose her words, though Khouri knew it was all annoying fakery. “Interesting. It may limit our options in the future.”

“Are you still sure you want him killed?”

“Absolutely. This news merely heightens the urgency. Now there is the danger that Sajaki will try to bring Sylveste aboard.”

“Won’t it be easier for me to kill him then?”

“Certainly, but at that point killing him would not suffice. You would then have to find a way of destroying the ship itself. Whether or not you found a way to save yourself in the process would be your problem.”

Khouri frowned. Perhaps it was her, but very little of this made very much sense.

“But if I guarantee that Sylveste’s dead…”

“That would not suffice,” said the Mademoiselle, with what Khouri sensed was a new candour. “Killing him is part of what you must do, but not the entirety. You must be specific in the manner of killing.”

Khouri waited to hear what the woman had to say.

“You must allow him absolutely no warning; not even seconds. Furthermore, you must kill him in isolation.”

“That was always part of the plan.”

“Good—but I mean precisely what I say. If it isn’t possible to ensure solitude at any given moment, you must delay his death until it is. No compromises, Khouri.”

This was the first time they had discussed the manner of his death in any detail. Evidently the Mademoiselle had decided that Khouri was now fit to know slightly more than before, if not the whole picture.

“What about the weapon?”

“You may use any which suits you, provided the weapon incorporates no cybernetic components above a certain level of complexity, which I will stipulate at a later date.” Before Khouri could object she added, “A beam weapon would be acceptable, provided the weapon itself was not brought into proximity with the subject at any stage. Projectile and explosive devices would also serve our purpose.”

Given the nature of the lighthugger, Khouri thought, there ought to be enough suitable weapons lying around for her use. When the time came, she should be able to appropriate something moderately lethal and allow herself time to learn its nuances before deploying it against Sylveste.

“I can probably find something.”

“I’m not finished. You must not approach him, nor must you kill him when he is in the proximity of cybernetic systems—again, I will stipulate my requirements nearer the time. The more isolated he is, the better. If you can manage to do it when he is alone and far from help, on Resurgam’s surface, you will have accomplished your task to my complete satisfaction.” She paused. Evidently all this was hugely important to the Mademoiselle, and Khouri was doing her best to remember it, but so far it sounded no more logical than the incantations of a Dark Age prescription against fever. “But on no account must he be allowed to leave Resurgam. Understand that, because when a lighthugger arrives around Resurgam—even this lighthugger—Sylveste will try and find a way to get himself aboard. That must not be allowed to happen, under any circumstances.”

“I get the message,” Khouri said. “Kill him down below. Is that everything?”

“Not quite.” The ghost made a smile; a ghoulish one Khouri had never seen before. Maybe, she thought, the Mademoiselle had yet to exhaust her reservoir of expressions, keeping a few in store for moments such as this. “Of course I want proof of his death. This implant will record the event, but on your return to Yellowstone I also want physical evidence to corroborate what the implant records. I want remains, and more than just ashes. Preserve what you can in vacuum. Keep the remains sealed and isolated from the ship. Bury them in rock if that suits you, but just bring them back to me. I must have proof.”

“And then?”

“Then, Ana Khouri, I will give you your husband.”

Sylveste did not stop to catch his breath until he and Pascale had reached and passed the ebony shell encasing the Amarantin city, taking several hundred footsteps into the tangled maze which wormholed through it. He chose his directions as randomly as was humanly possible, ignoring the signs added by the archaeologists, desperately trying to avoid following a predictable path.

“Not so quickly,” Pascale said. “I’m worried about getting lost.”

Sylveste put a hand to her mouth, even though he knew that her need to talk was only a way to obliterate the fact of her father’s assassination.

“We have to be quiet. There must be True Path units in the shell, waiting to mop up escapees. We don’t want to draw them down on us.”

“But we’re lost,” she said, her voice now hushed. “Dan, people died in this place because they couldn’t find their way out before they starved.”

Sylveste pushed Pascale down a constricting bolthole into steadily thickening darkness. The walls were slippery here; no friction flooring had been installed. “The one thing that isn’t going to happen,” he said, more calmly than he felt, “is that we get lost.” He tapped his eyes, though it was already much too gloomy for Pascale to notice the gesture. Like a seeing person among the blind, he had trouble remembering that much of his nonverbal communication was wasted. “I can replay every step we take. And the walls reflect infrared from our bodies reasonably well. We’re safer here than back in the city.”

She panted along behind him, saying nothing for long minutes. Finally she mumbled, “I hope this isn’t one of the rare occasions when you’re wrong. That would be a particularly inauspicious start to our marriage, don’t you think?”

He did not much feel like laughing; the hall’s carnage was still garishly fresh in his mind. He laughed all the same, and the gesture seemed to lessen the reality of it all. Which was all for the better, because when he thought about it rationally, Pascale’s doubts were perfectly justified. Even if he knew the precise way out of the maze, that knowledge might be unusable, if the tunnels were too slippery to climb, or if, as rumour had it, the labyrinth occasionally changed its own configuration. Then, magic eyes or no, they would starve along with all the other poor fools who had wandered away from the marked path.

They worked deeper into the Amarantin structure, feeling the lazy curve of the tunnel as it wound its way maggottishly through the inner shell. Panic was as much an enemy as disorientation, of course. But forcing oneself to stay calm was never easy.

“How long do you think we should stay here?”

“A day,” Sylveste said. “Then we leave after them. By then, reinforcements will have arrived from Cuvier.”

“Working for whom?”

Sylveste shouldered into a wasp-waist in the tunnel. Beyond, it bottled out into a triple-junction; he made a mental coin-flip and took the left way. “Good question,” he said, too softly for his wife to hear him.

But what if the incident had merely been part of a colony-wide coup, rather than an isolated act of publicly visible terrorism? What if Cuvier was now out of Girardieau government control, fallen to True Path? Girardieau’s death left behind a lumbering party machine, but many of its cogs had been removed in the wedding hall. In this moment of weakness, blitzkrieg revolutionaries might accomplish much. Perhaps it was already over, Sylveste’s former enemies dethroned, strange new faces assuming power. In which case, waiting in the labyrinth might be completely futile. Would True Path regard him as an enemy, or as something infinitely more ambiguous; an enemy’s enemy?

Not that Girardieau and he had even been enemies, at the end.

Finally, they came to a wide, flat-bottomed throat where a number of tunnels converged. There was room to sit down, and the air was fresh and breezy; pumped air currents reached this far. In infrared, Sylveste watched Pascale slump cautiously down, hands scrabbling the frictionless floor for rats, sharp stones or grinning skulls.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re safe here.” As if by the very act of saying as much, he made it more likely. “If anyone comes, we can pick our escape routes. We’ll lie low and see what happens.”

Of course, now that the immediate flight was over, she would begin thinking about her father again. He did not want that; not now.

“Stupid dumb Janequin,” he said, hoping to steer her thoughts at least tangentially away from what had happened. “They must have blackmailed him. Isn’t that the way it always happens?”

“What?” Pascale asked labouredly. “Isn’t that the way what always happens?”

“The pure becomes corrupted.” His voice was so low it threatened to crack into a whisper. The gas used in the auditorium attack had not properly reached his lungs, but he could still feel its effect on his larynx. “Janequin was working on those birds for years; all the time I knew him in Mantell. They started as innocent living sculptures. He said any colony orbiting a star named Pavonis ought to have a few peacocks around the place. Then someone thought of a better use for them.”

“Perhaps they were all poisonous,” Pascale said, stretching the final word into a long slither of sibilant esses. “Primed like little walking bombs.”

“Somehow I doubt he tampered with more than a few of them.” Maybe it was the air, but Sylveste felt suddenly weary, needful of immediate sleep. He knew they were safe for now. If the killers had been following them—and the killers might not even realise they were not among the dead—they would have reached this part of the shell already.

“I never believed he had real enemies,” Pascale said, her sentence seeming to writhe unattached in the confined space. He imagined her fear: without vision, with only his assurances, this dark place must be exquisitely frightening. “I never thought anyone would kill him for what they wanted. I didn’t think anything was worth that much.”

Along with the rest of the crew, Khouri would eventually enter reefersleep for the bulk of the time that the ship took to reach Resurgam. But before then she spent much of her waking time in the gunnery, being subjected to endless simulations.

After a while it began to invade her dreams, to the point where boredom was no longer an adequate term to encompass the repetitiousness of the exercises Volyova had conceived for her. Yet losing herself in the gunnery environment was something she began to welcome, since it offered temporary respite from her worries. In the gunnery, the whole Sylveste problem became a small anxious itch, nothing more. She remained aware that she was in an impossible situation, but that fact no longer seemed critical. The gunnery was all, and that was why she no longer feared it. She was still herself after the sessions, and she began to think that the gunnery hardly mattered at all; that it would not ultimately make any difference to the outcome of her mission.

All that changed when the dogs came home.

They were the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds: cybernetic agents she had unleashed into the gunnery during one of Khouri’s sessions. The dogs had clawed their way into the system itself via the neural interface, exploiting the system’s one forgivable weakness. Volyova had hardened it against software attack, but had obviously never imagined that the attack might come from the brain of the person hooked into the gunnery. The dogs barked back safe assurances that they had entered the gunnery’s core. They had not returned to Khouri during the session in which they were unleashed, since it would take more than a few hours for them to sniff every nook and cranny of the gunnery’s Byzantine architecture. So they had stayed in the system for more than a day, until Volyova once again hooked Khouri in.

Then the dogs returned to the Mademoiselle, and she decrypted them and unravelled the prey they had located.

“She has a stowaway,” the Mademoiselle said when she and Khouri were alone after a session. “Something has hidden itself in the gunnery system, and I’m prepared to bet she knows nothing about it at all.”

Which was when Khouri stopped regarding the gunnery chamber with such total equanimity. “Go on,” she said, feeling her body temperature plummet.

“A data entity; that’s as well as I can describe it.”

“Something the dogs encountered?”

“Yes, but…” Once again the Mademoiselle sounded lost for words. Occasionally Khouri suspected it was genuine: the implant was having to deal with a situation light-years away from anything in the real Mademoiselle’s expectations. “It’s not that they saw it, or even saw a part of it. It’s too subtle for that, or else Volyova’s own counter-intrusion systems would have caught it. It’s more that they sensed the absences where it had just been; sensed the breeze it stirred when it moved around.”

“Do me a favour,” Khouri said. “Try not to make it sound so damned scary, will you?”

“I’m sorry,” the Mademoiselle answered. “But I can’t deny that the thing’s presence is disturbing.”

“Disturbing to you? How do you think I feel?” Khouri shook her head, stunned at the casual viciousness of reality.” All right; what do you think it is? Some kind of virus, like all the others which are eating away this ship?”

“The thing seems much too advanced for that. Volyova’s own defences have kept the ship operational despite the other viral entities, and she’s even kept the Melding Plague at bay. But this…” The Mademoiselle looked at Khouri with a convincing facsimile of fear. “The dogs were frightened by it, Khouri. In the way it evaded them, it revealed itself to be much cleverer than almost anything in my experience. But it didn’t attack them, and that troubles me even more.”

“Yes?”

“Because it suggests that the thing is biding its time.”

Sylveste never found out how long they had slept. It might only have been minutes, packed with fevered, adrenalin-charged dreams of chaos and flight, or it might have been hours, or even a whole portion of the day. No way of knowing. Whatever the case, it had not been natural fatigue that sent them under. Roused by something, Sylveste realised with a stunned jolt that they had been breathing sleeping gas, pumped into the tunnel system. No wonder the air had seemed so fragrant and breezy.

There was a sound like rats in the attic.

He pawed Pascale awake; she came to consciousness with a plaintive moan, assimilating her surroundings and predicament in a few troubled seconds of reality-denial. He studied the heat-signature of her face, watching waxy neutrality cave in to an expressive melange of remorse and fear.

“We have to move,” Sylveste said. “They’re after us—they gassed the tunnels.”

The scrabbling sound grew closer by the second. Pascale was still somewhere between wakefulness and dream, but she managed to open her mouth—it sounded as if she were speaking through cotton wool—and ask him, “Which way?”

“This way,” Sylveste said, grabbing her and propelling her forwards, down the nearest valvelike opening. She stumbled on the slipperiness. Sylveste helped her up, squeezed beyond her and took her hand. Gloom lay ahead, his eyes revealing only a few metres of the tunnel beyond their position. He was, he realised, only slightly less blind than his wife.

Better than nothing.

“Wait,” Pascale said. “There’s light behind us, Dan!”

And voices. He could hear their wordless, urgent babble now. The rattle of sterile metal. Chemosensor arrays were probably already tracking them; pheromonal sniffers were reading the airborne human effluent of panic, graphing data directly into the sensoria of the chasers.

“Faster,” Pascale said. He snatched a glance back, his eyes momentarily overloaded by the new light. It was a bluish radiance limning the shaft’s far reach, quivering, as if someone were holding a torch. He tried to increase speed, but the tunnel was steepening, making it harder to find traction on the glassily smooth sides: too much like trying to scramble up an ice chimney.

Panting sounds, metal scraping against the walls, barked commands.

Too steep now. It was now a constant battle just to hold balance, just to keep from slipping backwards. “Get behind me,” he said, turning to face the blue light.

Pascale rushed past him.

“What now?”

The light wavered, crept in intensity. “We have no choice,” Sylveste said. “We can’t outrun them, Pascale. Have to turn and face them.”

“That’s suicide.”

“Maybe they won’t kill us if they see our faces.”

He thought to himself that four thousand years of human civilisation put the lie to that hope, but, given that it was the only one he had, it hardly mattered that it was forlorn. His wife locked her arms round his chest and pressed her head against his, looking the same way. Her breathing was pulsed and terrified. Sylveste had no doubt that his own sounded much the same.

The enemy could probably smell their fear, quite literally.

“Pascale,” Sylveste said. “I need to tell you something.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.” He could no longer separate his own rapid breathing from hers, each exhalation a quick hard beat against the skin. “In case I don’t get a chance to tell anyone else. Something I’ve kept a secret for too long.”

“You mean in case we die?”

He avoided answering her question directly, one half of his mind trying to guess how many seconds or tens of seconds they had left. Perhaps not enough for what had to be said. “I lied,” he said. “About what happened around Lascaille’s Shroud.”

She started to say something.

“No, wait,” Sylveste said. “Hear me out. I have to say this. Have to get it out.”

Her voice was barely audible. “Say it.”

“Everything that I said happened out there was true.” Her eyes were wide now; oval voids in the heat-map of her face. “It just happened in reverse. It wasn’t Carine Lefevre’s transform that began to break down when we were close to the Shroud.”

“What are you saying?”

“That it was mine. I was the one who nearly got both of us killed.” He paused, waiting either for her to say something, or for the chasers to erupt from the blue light which was slowly creeping closer. When neither happened he continued, lost in the momentum of confession. “My Juggler transform started to decay. The gravity fields around the Shroud began to lash at us. Carine was going to die unless I separated my half of the contact module from hers.”

He could imagine the way she was trying to fit this over the existing template she carried in her mind, part of the consensus history with which she had been born. What he was saying was not, could not, should not be the truth. The way it was was very simple. Lefevre’s transform had begun to decay; Lefevre had made the supreme sacrifice, jettisoning her half of the contact module so that Sylveste stood a chance at surviving this bruising encounter with the totally alien. It could not be any other way. It was what she knew.

Except it was all untrue.

“Which is what I should have done. Easy to say now, after the fact. But I couldn’t, not there and then.” She could not read his expression, and he was unsure whether this pleased or displeased him at this moment. “I couldn’t blow the separation charges.”

“Why not?”

And he thought: what she wants me to say is that it was not physically possible; that the quiet space had become too restricted for physical movement; that the gravity vortices were pinning him immobile, even as they worked to rip him flesh from bone. But that would have been a lie, and he was beyond that now.

“I was scared,” Sylveste said. “More scared than I’ve ever been in my life. Scared of what dying in an alien place would mean. Scared of what would happen to my soul, around that place. In what Lascaille called Revelation Space.” He coughed, knowing there wasn’t much time left. “Irrational, but that was how I felt. The simulations hadn’t prepared us for the terror.”

“Yet you made it.”

“Gravity torsions ripped the craft apart; did the job the explosive charges were meant to do. I didn’t die… and that I don’t understand, because I should have.”

“And Carine?”

Before he could answer—as if he even had an answer—a sickly-sweet smell hit them. Sleeping gas again, only this time in a much thicker dose. It flooded his lungs. He wanted to sneeze. He forgot about Lascaille’s Shroud, forgot Carine, forgot his own part in whatever had become of her. Sneezing was suddenly the most important thing in his universe.

That and clawing his skin off with his fingers.

A man stood against the blue. His expression was unreadable beneath his mask, but his stance conveyed nothing more than bored indifference. Languidly, he raised his left arm. At first it appeared that he was holding a trigger-grip megaphone, but the way he held the device was infinitely more purposeful. Calmly he sighted until the flared weapon was pointed straight at Sylveste’s eyes.

He did something—it was completely silent—and molten agony spiked into Sylveste’s brain.