The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Assassination tools!’ Girardieau shouted. He slumped under the table, dragging Sylveste and his daughter with him. The auditorium was chaos now, a frenzied mass of agitated people trying to escape.

  ‘Janequin’s birds were primed!’ Girardieau said, virtually screaming in Sylveste’s ear. ‘Poison darts - in their tails.’

  ‘You’re hit,’ Pascale said, too stunned for her voice to carry much emotion. Light and smoke burst over their heads. They heard screams. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylveste saw the perfume woman holding a sleekly evil pistol in a two-handed grip. She was dousing the audience with it, its fanged barrel spitting cold pulses of boser energy. The float-cams swept round her, dispassionately recording the carnage. Sylveste had never seen a weapon like the one the woman used. He knew it could not have been manufactured on Resurgam, which left only two possibilities. Either it had arrived from Yellowstone with the original settlement, or it had been sold by Remilliod, the trader who had passed through the system since the coup. Glass - Amarantin glass that had survived ten thousand centuries - broke shrilly above. Like pieces of shattered toffee, it crashed down in jagged shards into the audience. Sylveste watched, powerless, as the ruby planes buried themselves in flesh, like frozen lightning. The terrified were already screaming loud enough to drown out the cries of those in pain.

  What remained of Girardieau’s security team was mobilising, but terribly slowly. Four of the militia were down, their faces punctured by the barbs. One had reached the seating, struggling with the woman who had the gun. Another was opening fire with his own sidearm, scything through Janequin’s birds.

  Girardieau meanwhile was groaning. His eyes were rolling, bloodshot, hands grasping at thin air.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Sylveste said, shouting in Pascale’s ear. She seemed still dazed from the neural transfer, blearily oblivious to what was happening.

  ‘But my father . . .’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  Sylveste eased Girardieau’s dead weight onto the cold floor of the temple, careful to keep behind the safety of the table.

  ‘The barbs were meant to kill, Pascale. There’s nothing we can do for him. If we stay, we’ll just end up following him.’

  Girardieau croaked something. It might have been ‘Go’, or it might only have been a final senseless exhalation.

  ‘We can’t leave him!’ Pascale said.

  ‘If we don’t, his killers end up winning.’

  Tears slashed her face. ‘Where can we go?’

  He looked around frantically. Smoke from concussion shells was filling the chamber, probably from Girardieau’s own people. It was settling in lazy pastel spirals, like scarves tossed from a dancer. Just when it was almost too dark to see, the room plunged into total blackness. The lights beyond the temple had obviously been turned off, or destroyed.

  Pascale gasped.

  His eyes slipped into infrared mode, almost without him having to think about it.

  ‘I can still see,’ he whispered to her. ‘As long as we stay together, you don’t have to worry about the darkness.’

  Praying that the danger from the birds was gone, Sylveste rose slowly to his feet. The temple glowed in grey-green heat. The perfume woman was dead, a fist-sized hot hole in her side. Her amber jar was smashed at her feet. He guessed it had been some kind of hormonal trigger, keyed to receptors Janequin had put in the birds. He had to have been part of it. He looked - but Janequin was dead. A tiny dagger sat in his chest, trailing hot rivulets down his brocade jacket.

  Sylveste grabbed Pascale and shoved her along the ground towards the exit, a vaulted archway gilded with Amarantin figurines and bas-relief graphicforms. It seemed that the perfume woman had been the only assassin actually present, if one discounted Janequin. But now her friends were entering, garbed in chameleoflage. They wore close-fitting breather masks and infrared goggles.

  He pushed Pascale behind a jumble of upturned tables.

  ‘They’re looking for us,’ he hissed. ‘But they probably think we’re already dead.’

  Girardieau’s surviving security people had fallen back and taken up defensive positions, kneeling within the fan-shaped auditorium. It was no match: the newcomers carried much heavier weapons, heavy boser-rifles. Girardieau’s militia countered with low-yield lasers and projectile weapons, but the enemy were cutting them apart with blithe, impersonal ease. At least half the audience were unconscious or dead; they had caught the brunt of the peacock venom salvo. Hardly the most surgically precise of assassination tools, those birds - but they had been allowed into the auditorium completely unchecked. Sylveste observed that two were still alive, despite what he had at first imagined. Still triggered by trace molecules of the perfume which remained aloft, their tails were flicking open and shut like the fans of nervous courtesans.

  ‘Did your father carry a weapon?’ Sylveste said, instantly regretting his use of the past tense. ‘I mean, since the coup.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Pascale said.

  Of course not; Girardieau would never have confided such a thing to her. Quickly Sylveste felt around the man’s still body, hoping to find the padded hardness of a weapon beneath his ceremonial clothes.

  Nothing.

  ‘We’ll have to do without,’ Sylveste said, as if the stating of this fact would somehow alleviate the problem it encapsulated. ‘They’re going to kill us if we don’t run,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Into the labyrinth?’

  ‘They’ll see us,’ Sylveste said.

  ‘But maybe they won’t think it’s us,’ Pascale said. ‘They might not know you can see in the dark.’ Though she was effectively blind, she managed to look him square in the face. Her mouth was open, an almost circular vacancy of expression or hope. ‘Let me say goodbye to my father first.’

  She found his body in the darkness, kissed him for the last time. Sylveste looked to the exit. At that moment the soldier guarding it was hit by a shot from what remained of Girardieau’s militia. The masked figure crumpled, his body heat pooling liquidly into the floor around his body, spreading smoky white maggots of thermal energy into the stonework.

  The way was clear, for the moment. Pascale found his hand and together they began to run.

  EIGHT

  En Route to Delta Pavonis, 2546

  ‘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.’

  ‘Som
ehow 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.