Khouri shook her head in abject disbelief.
‘I thought you wanted me to kill Sylveste.’
‘The weapon may now make that end achievable rather sooner than I anticipated.’
‘No,’ Khouri said, after the Mademoiselle’s remark had had time to settle in. ‘You wouldn’t wipe out a planet just to kill one man.’
‘Discovered a conscience all of a sudden, have we?’ The Mademoiselle shook her head, lips pursed. ‘You exhibited no qualms over Sylveste. Why should the deaths of others trouble you so much? Or is it simply a question of scale?’
‘It’s just . . .’ Khouri hesitated, knowing what she was about to say would not trouble the Mademoiselle. ‘Inhuman. But I don’t expect you to understand that.’
The elevator halted, door opening to reveal the semi-flooded access way which led to the gunnery. Khouri took a moment to get her bearings. Ever since the descent had begun, she had been suffering the worst headache imaginable. It seemed to be lessening now, but she had no wish to dwell on what might have caused it.
‘Quickly,’ Volyova said, traipsing out.
‘What you don’t understand,’ the Mademoiselle said, ‘is why I would go to the trouble of destroying an entire colony just to ensure one man’s death.’
Khouri followed Volyova, boots disappearing to the knees in the flood.
‘Damn right I don’t. And I’d try and stop you whether I did or not.’
‘Not if you grasped the facts, Khouri. You’d actually be urging me on.’
‘Then it’s your fault for not telling me.’
They pushed through bulkhead seals, dead janitor-rats bobbing by as the water levels equalised, loosened from the little crannies where they had curled up to expire.
‘Where’s the shuttle?’ Khouri called.
‘Parked over the space-door,’ Volyova said, turning back to look Khouri in the eye. ‘And the weapon hasn’t emerged yet.’
‘Does that mean we won?’
‘Means we haven’t lost yet. But I still want you in the gunnery.’
The Mademoiselle had gone now, but her disembodied voice lingered, wrongly echoless in the cramped corridor.
‘It won’t do you any good. There’s no system in the gunnery that I can’t override, so your presence would be futile.’
‘So why are you obviously so keen to talk me out of going in there?’
The Mademoiselle did not answer.
Two bulkheads further, they reached the ceiling access point which led to the chamber. They were running by that point, and it took a few moments for the water to stop sloshing up and down the angled sides of the corridor. When it did, Volyova frowned.
‘Something’s up,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Can’t you hear it? There’s a noise.’ She angled her head. ‘Seems to be coming from the gunnery itself.’
Khouri could hear it for herself now. It was a high-pitched mechanical sound, like ancient industrial machinery going haywire.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Volyova paused. ‘At least, I hope I don’t. Let’s get inside.’
Volyova reached up and tugged at the overhead access door, budging it open, a small shower of ship-sludge loosening from its seals, spattering their shoulders. The alloy ladder descended, the industrial noise intensifying. It was clearly coming from the gunnery itself. The gunnery’s bright internal lights were on, but they appeared to be unsteady, as if something were moving around up there interrupting the light-beams. Whatever it was was moving quickly as well.
‘Ilia,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I like this.’
‘Join the club.’
Her bracelet chimed. Volyova was bending to examine it when an almighty shudder rammed through the entire fabric of the ship. The two of them slipped into the floodwater, falling against the slippery corridor-sides. Khouri was struggling to her feet when a tiny tidal wave of viscous sludge upended her. She hit the deck. For a moment she was swallowing the stuff, the closest to eating shit since her army days. Volyova hooked her by the elbows, hauling her to her feet. Khouri gagged and spat out the sludge, though the awful taste lingered.
Volyova’s bracelet was in scream-mode again.
‘What the hell . . .’
‘The shuttle,’ Volyova said. ‘We just lost it.’
‘What?’
‘I mean it just got blown up.’ Volyova coughed. Her face was wet; she must have taken a good mouthful of the stuff herself. ‘Far as I can tell, the cache-weapon didn’t even have to push its way out. Secondary weapons did the job - turned on the shuttle.’
Above, the gunnery was still making frightening noises.
‘You want me to go up there, don’t you?’
Volyova nodded. ‘Right now, getting you in the chair is the only option we have left. But don’t worry. I’m right behind you.’
‘Listen to her,’ the Mademoiselle said, quite suddenly. ‘All ready to have you do what she hasn’t the guts to do herself.’
‘Or the implants,’ Khouri shouted, aloud.
‘What?’ Volyova said.
‘Nothing.’ Khouri planted one foot on the lowest rung. ‘Just telling an old friend to go stuff herself.’ Her foot slid off the slime-encrusted rung. Next attempt, she found something approximating a grip and planted her second foot on the same rung. Her head was poking into the little access tunnel which fed into the gunnery, no more than two metres above.
‘You won’t get in,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘I’m controlling the chair. As soon as you put your head into the chamber, you lose it.’
‘I’d love to see the look on your face, in that case.’
‘Khouri, haven’t you grasped things yet? The loss of your head would be no more than a minor inconvenience.’
Her head was just below the chamber entrance now. She could see the gimballed chair, moving in whiplash arcs through the chamber’s volume. It had never been designed for such acrobatics; Khouri could smell the ozone of fried power-systems greasing the air. ‘Volyova,’ she called, shouting above the din. ‘You built this set-up. Can you cut the power to the chair from below?’
‘Cut power to the chair? Certainly - but what good would it do us? I need you linking in to the gunnery.’
‘Not everything - just enough to stop the bastard moving around.’
There was a brief pause, during which Khouri imagined Volyova summoning ancient wiring diagrams to mind. The woman had constructed the gunnery herself - but it might have been decades and decades of subjective time ago, and something as vulgarly functional as the main power trunk had probably never needed to be upgraded since.
‘Well,’ Volyova said, eventually. ‘There’s a main feed line here - suppose I could sever it . . .’
Volyova left, trudging quickly out of sight below. It sounded simple; severing the power feed. Maybe, Khouri thought, Volyova would have to fetch a specialised cutter from elsewhere. Surely there was not that much time. But no; Volyova had something. There was that little laser, the one she used to flense away samples from Captain Brannigan. She always carried it. Agonising seconds passed, Khouri thinking of the cache-weapon, easing slowly beyond the hull, entering naked space. By now it would be locking on target - Resurgam - going to final power-up, preparing to unleash a pulse of gravitational death.
Above, the noise stopped.
All was still, the light steady. The chair hung motionless within its gimbals, a throne imprisoned within an elegantly curved cage.
Volyova shouted, ‘Khouri, there’s a secondary power-source. The gunnery can tap it, if it senses a drain from the main feed. Means you might not have much time to reach the chair . . .’
Khouri sprang into the gunnery, heaving her body weight out of the hole in the floor. The slender alloy gimbals now looked sharper than before. She moved fast, monkeying through the feed lines, hopping under or above the gimbals. The chair was still static, but the closer she got, the less room she would have if the apparatus swung into m
otion again. If it happened now, she thought, the walls would be rapidly redecorated in sticky, coagulating red.
And then she was in. Khouri buckled, and the instant she closed the clasp, the chair whined and shot forwards. The gimbals rolled about her, swerving the chair backwards and forwards, upside down and sideways, until all sense of orientation was lost. The motion was neck-breaking, and Khouri felt her eyeballs bulging out of their sockets with each hairpin reversal - but the motion was surely less vicious than before.
She wants to deter me, Khouri thought, but not kill me . . . yet.
‘Don’t attempt to hook in,’ the Mademoiselle said.
‘Because it might screw up your little plan?’
‘Not at all. Might I remind you of Sun Stealer? He’s waiting in there.’
The chair was still bucking, but not so violently as to hinder conscious thought.
‘Maybe he doesn’t exist,’ Khouri said, subvocalising. ‘Maybe you invented him to have more leverage over me.’
‘Go ahead then.’
Khouri made the helmet lower itself down over her head, masking the whirling motion of the chamber. Her palm rested on the interface control. All it would take was slight pressure to initiate the link; to close the circuit which would result in her psyche being sucked into the military data-abstraction known as gunspace.
‘You can’t do it, can you? Because you believe me. Once you open that connection, there’s no going back.’
She increased the pressure, feeling the slight give as the control threatened to close. Then - either via some unconscious neuromuscular twitch, or because part of her knew it had to be done, she closed the connection. The gunnery environment enfolded around her, as it had done in a thousand tactical simulations. Spatial data came first: her own body-image become nebulous, replaced by the lighthugger and its immediate surroundings, and then a series of hierarchical overlays conveying the tactical/strategic situation, constantly updating, self-checking its own assumptions, running frantic realtime-extrapolated simulations.
She assimilated.
The cache-weapon was holding station, several hundred metres away from the hull. Its prong was pointed in the direction of flight, straight towards Resurgam - allowing, Khouri knew, for the tiny relativistic light-bending effects caused by their moderate velocity. Near the space-door from which the weapon had emerged, the shuttle had left a black smear along the side of the hull. There were damage-points there; Khouri felt them as little pricks of discomfort, numbing as auto-repair systems phased in. Gravity sensors felt ripples emanating from the weapon; Khouri felt periodic - and quickening - breezes wash over her. The black holes in the weapon must be spinning up, orbiting quicker and quicker around the torus.
A presence sniffed her, not from outside, but from within the gunnery itself.
‘Sun Stealer’s detected your entry,’ the Mademoiselle said.
‘No problem.’ Khouri reached out into gunspace, slipping abstract hands into cybernetically realised gauntlets. ‘I’m accessing ship’s defences. A few seconds is all I need.’
But something was wrong. The weapons felt differently from the way they had in simulation; unwilling to budge to her whims. Quickly she intuited: they were being fought over, and she was merely joining in the struggle.
The Mademoiselle - or rather, her avatar - was trying to block the hull defences, prevent them from being turned on the cache-weapon. The weapon itself was firmly out of Khouri’s reach, veiled by numerous firewalls. But who - or what - was resisting the Mademoiselle, trying to bring those weapons to bear? Sun Stealer, of course. She could sense him now. Vast, powerful, but also intent on invisibility and slyness, careful to camouflage his actions behind routine data movements. For years that had worked, and Volyova had known nothing of his presence. But now Sun Stealer was driven to recklessness, like a crab forced to scuttle from one hideaway to another by the retreating tide. Nothing remotely human; no sense that this third presence in the gunnery was anything so mundane as another downloaded personality simulation; what Sun Stealer felt like was pure mentality, as if this data-representation was all that he had ever been; all that he ever would be.
It felt like absolutely nothing - but a locus of nothingness which had somehow achieved a terrifying degree of organisation.
Was she seriously contemplating joining forces with this thing?
Maybe. If that was what it took to stop the Mademoiselle.
‘You can still back out,’ the woman said. ‘He’s busy at the moment - can’t spare his energies to invade you. But in a moment that won’t be the case.’
Now the aiming systems were at least under her control, although they operated sluggishly. She bracketed the cache-weapon, encasing the whole bulk in a potential sphere of annihilation. Now all that had to happen was for the Mademoiselle to surrender control of the weapons, if only for the microsecond necessary for them to slew, target and fire.
She felt them loosen. She - or rather, she and Sun Stealer - seemed to be winning.
‘Don’t do this, Khouri. You don’t know what’s at stake . . .’
‘Then clue me in, bitch. Tell me what’s so important.’
The cache-weapon was moving away from the hull, surely a sign that the Mademoiselle was worried about its safety. But the pulses of gravitational radiation were quickening, now coming almost too rapidly to separate. No guessing how long it would be before the cache-weapon fired, but Khouri suspected it could only be seconds away.
‘Listen,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘You want the truth, Khouri?’
‘Damn right I do.’
‘Then you’d better brace yourself. You’re about to get the whole thing.’
And then - as soon as she had adjusted to being sucked into gunspace - she felt herself being sucked somewhere else entirely. The odd thing was that it seemed to be a part of herself she had until that moment completely overlooked.
They were on a battlefield, surrounded by the chameleoflaged bubbletents, the temporary enclosures of some hospital or forward command post. The sky above the compound was azure, cloud-streaked, but littered with dirty, intermingling vapour trails. It was as if some world-spanning squid were spilling its viscera into the stratosphere. Sowing the trails, and darting between them, were numerous arrow-winged jet aircraft. Lower, there were drone-dirigibles and, lower still, bulbous-bodied transport helicopters, tilt-wings and veetols, skimming the periphery of the compound, occasionally dropping to disgorge armoured personnel carriers or walking troops, ambulances or armed servitors. There was a scorched, grass-covered apron to one side of the compound, where six delta-winged, windowless aircraft were parked on skids, their upper surfaces precisely mimicking the sun-bleached hue of the ground, their VTOL irises open for inspection.
Khouri felt herself stumbling, falling towards the grass at her feet. She wore chameleoflage fatigues, currently emitting in dappled khaki. There was a lightweight projectile weapon in her hands, its alloy grip contour-moulded to match her palm. She was helmeted, a two-d readout monocle dangling down from the helmet’s rim, showing a false-colour heat-map of the battlezone, telemetered from one of the dirigibles.
‘This way, please.’
A whitehat was directing her into one of the bubbletents. Inside, an aide took her gun, ident-chipped it and racked it with eight other weapons, varying in firepower from projectile units like her own to medium-yield party-poopers and a ferocious shoulder-held ack-am weapon, something one would really not want to use on the same continent as one’s adversary. The feed from the dirigibles fuzzed and vanished, occluded by the anti-surveillance shroud around the bubbletent. She reached up with her now free hand and flicked the monocle back over the helmet rim, raking a strand of sweaty hair away from her eye with the same movement.
‘Through here, Khouri.’
They led her into a partitioned back area of the tent, through a room filled with bunkbeds, injured, and quietly humming medservitors, craning over their patients like mechanised green swans. From outs
ide she heard a shriek of jets, then a series of concussive explosions, but no one inside the tent seemed to even notice the sound.
Finally they let her into a tiny, square-walled room outfitted with a single desk. The walls were draped with the transnational flags of the Northern Coalition and there was a large bronze-mounted globe of Sky’s Edge on one corner of the desk. The globe was currently in geological mode, showing only the varying landmasses and terrain-types on the surface, rather than the hotly contested political boundaries. But Khouri paid it no more than cursory attention, because what snared her attention was the person sitting behind the desk, in full military dress: cross-buttoned olive-drab tunic, gold epaulettes, a conspicuous panoply of NC medals ranked across his chest, his black hair slicked back in brilliant grooves.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fazil said. ‘That it had to happen this way. But now that you’re here . . .’ He motioned across the room. ‘Have a seat; we need to talk. Rather urgently, as it happens.’
Khouri recalled, distantly, another place. She remembered a chamber, metallic, containing a seat, but while there was something about the memory that made her nervous - as if time were precious - it felt unreal compared to the present, which was this room. Fazil absorbed her attention totally. He looked exactly as she remembered him (remembered him from where, she wondered?), although his cheek bore evidence of a scar she did not recall, and he had grown a moustache, or at least (she could not be sure) changed something about the one he had worn last time; thickened it or allowed it to grow out from simply thick black stubble, to the point where it now had the onset of a rakish droop on either side of his upper lip.
She did as he had suggested, easing herself into a folding chair.
‘She - the Mademoiselle - worried that it might come to this,’ Fazil said, his lips barely moving, or seeming to move, beneath the moustache. ‘So she took certain measures. While you were still on Yellowstone, she implanted a series of closed-access memories. They were tagged to activate - to become accessible to your conscious mind - only when she deemed them useful.’ He reached across the desk and spun the globe, allowing it to whir before stopping it abruptly. ‘As a matter of fact, the process of unlocking those memories began some while ago. Do you remember a slight migraine attack in the elevator?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 29