Khouri did indeed know suits, just as she had claimed. The suits on Sky’s Edge had been rare imports, purchased from Ultra traders who made stopover around the war-torn planet. No one on the Edge had the expertise to actually duplicate them, which meant that those units which her side had bought were fabulously valuable: powerful totems dispensed from gods.
The suit scanned her, assessing her bodily dimensions before adjusting its own interior to precisely match her contours. Khouri then allowed it to step forward and surround her, suppressing the tinge of claustrophobia that accompanied the process. Within a few seconds the suit had locked tight and filled itself with gel-air, enabling manoeuvres which would otherwise have crushed its occupant. The suit’s persona interrogated Khouri regarding small details she might wish changed, allowing her to customise her weapons suite and adjust its autonomous routines. Of course, none but the lightest weapons would actually be deployed in Chamber Two; the combat scenarios which were to be enacted would be a seamless mixture of real, physical action and simulated weapons-usage, but it was the point that counted. One had to treat every aspect of the enterprise with the utmost seriousness, including the limitless choices which the suit offered for the convenience of despatching any enemies who might have the misfortune to stray into its sphere of superiority.
There were three of them, apart from Khouri herself, but she was the only one who was not in serious contention for the surface operation. Volyova took the lead. Although her conversations with Khouri suggested that she had been born in space, she had visited planets on more than one occasion, and had acquired the appropriate, near-instinctive reflexes which bettered the chances of surviving a planetary excursion; not least amongst these being a profound respect for the law of gravitation. The same went for Sudjic; she had been born in a habitat, or possibly a lighthugger, but had visited enough worlds to gain the right moves. Her bladelike thinness, which made it look as if she could not possibly have taken a footstep on a large planet without breaking every bone in her body, did not fool Khouri for a moment; Sudjic was like a building designed by a master architect, who knew the precise stresses which had to be obeyed by every articulation and strut, and took an aesthetic pride in allowing for no additional tolerances. Kjarval, the woman who was always with Sudjic, was different again. Unlike her friend, she exhibited no extreme chimeric traits; all her limbs her own. But she resembled no human Khouri had ever known. Her face was sleek, as if optimised for some unspecified aquatic environment. Her catlike eyes were gridded red orbs with no pupils. Her nostrils and ears were rilled apertures, and her mouth was a largely expressionless slot; one that barely moved when the woman spoke, but was permanently curved in an expression of mild exaltation. She wore no clothes; not even in the relative cool of the suit storage room, yet to Khouri’s eyes she did not seem truly naked. Rather, she looked like a naked woman who had been dipped in some infinitely flexible, quick-drying polymer. A true Ultra, in other words, of uncertain and almost certainly non-Darwinian provenance. Khouri had heard tales of bioengineered human splinter-species cultured under the ice of worlds like Europa, or of merpeople, bio-adapted for life in totally flooded spacecraft. Kjarval seemed to be the living, freakishly hybrid embodiment of these myths. Alternatively, she might be something else entirely. Maybe she had wrought these transformations on herself for a whim. Maybe they were purposeless, or served only the deeper purpose of masking another identity entirely. Whatever; she knew worlds, and that - seemingly - was all that mattered.
Sajaki knew worlds as well, of course, but he was already on Resurgam, and it was not clear what role he would play in the recovery of Sylveste, if and when it happened. Of Triumvir Hegazi Khouri knew little, but through chance remarks, she had gleaned enough to know that the man had never set foot on anything which had not been manufactured. It was no wonder that Sajaki and Volyova had relegated Triumvir Hegazi to the more clerical aspects of their profession. He would not be allowed - nor did he even wish - to make the journey to Resurgam’s surface, when the time came.
Which left Khouri. There was no arguing with her experience; unlike any of the crew, she had demonstrably been born and raised on a planet, and - vitally - had seen action on one. It was probable - nothing she had heard led her to doubt the fact - that the Sky’s Edge war had placed her in situations far graver than any the crew had experienced beyond their ship. Their excursions had been shopping trips, trade missions or simple tourism; coming down to gloat at the compressed lives of ephemerals. Khouri had been in situations where, at times, it had seemed very unlikely that she would survive. Yet - because she had never been anything less than a competent soldier, and she was also lucky - she had come through relatively unscathed.
No one aboard the ship actually argued with this.
‘It’s not that we wouldn’t want you along,’ Volyova had said, not long after the incident with the cache-weapon. ‘Far from it. I’ve no doubt that you’d handle a suit as well as any of us, and you wouldn’t be likely to freeze under fire.’
‘Well, then . . .’
‘But I can’t risk losing my Gunnery Officer again.’ They had been having the discussion in the spider-room, but Volyova had lowered her voice all the same. ‘Only three people need to go down to Resurgam, and that means we don’t have to use you. Apart from me, Sudjic and Kjarval can handle the suits. In fact we’ve already begun training up.’
‘Then at least let me join in the sessions.’
Volyova had raised an arm, apparently to dimiss this suggestion. But as soon as she had done so she relented. ‘All right, Khouri. You get to train with us. But it doesn’t mean anything, understand?’
Oh yes, she understood. Things were different between Khouri and Volyova now - they had been ever since Khouri had told Volyova the lie about being an infiltrator for another crew. The Mademoiselle had long ago primed her for that particular little chat and it seemed to have worked perfectly, even down to the sly way the Galatea - completely innocent, of course - had deliberately not been mentioned, leaving Volyova to make that deduction herself, and thereby allowing her to feel some quiet satisfaction in the process. It was a red herring, but it mattered only that Volyova found it a plausible one. Volyova had also accepted the story about Sun Stealer being a piece of human-designed infiltration software, and for now her curiosity seemed satisfied. Now they were almost equals, both having something to hide from the rest of the crew, even if what Volyova thought she had on Khouri was not even close to the truth.
‘I understand,’ Khouri said.
‘Still, it’s a shame, though.’ Volyova smiled. ‘I get the impression you always wanted to meet Sylveste. You’ll get your chance, of course, once we bring him aboard . . .’
Khouri smiled. ‘That’ll have to do then, won’t it?’
Chamber Two was an empty twin of the chamber where the cache-weapons were kept.
Unlike the weapon-filled chamber, it had been pressurised up to one standard atmosphere. This was no mere extravagance; it constituted the largest single pocket of breathable air aboard the lighthugger, and was therefore used as a reservoir for supplying normally vacuum-filled regions of the ship with air when they needed to be entered by unsuited humans.
Usually the drive would have supplied an illusory one-gee of gravity, acting along the long axis of the ship, which was also the long axis of the roughly cylindrical chamber. But now that the drive had been quenched - now that the ship was in orbit around Resurgam - the illusion of gravity came from rotating the whole chamber, which meant that gravity acted at ninety degrees to the long axis, pushing radially outwards from the chamber’s middle. Near the middle, there was almost no gravity at all; objects could free-float there for minutes before their inevitable small initial drift slowly pushed them away from the middle. Thereafter, the increasing wind-pressure of the co-rotating air would tug them faster and lower. But nothing ‘fell’ in straight lines in the chamber, at least not from the point of view of someone standing on the rotating wall.
&
nbsp; They entered at one end of the cylinder, via an armoured clamshell door whose inner face was pitted with blast-marks and projectile impact-craters. Every visible surface of the chamber was similarly weathered; as far as Khouri could see (and the suit’s vision-augmentation routines meant she could see as far as she wished) there was no square metre of the chamber’s skin which had not been harried, scarred, gouged, buckled, assaulted, melted or corroded by some kind of weapon. It might once have been silver; now it was purple, like an all-enveloping metallic bruise. Illumination was supplied not from a stationary light source, but from dozens of free-floating drones, each of which picked out a spot on the chamber’s wall with a floodlight of actinic brilliance. The drones were constantly moving around, like a swarm of agitated glow-worms. The result was that no shadow in the chamber stayed still for more than a second or so, and it was impossible to look in any direction for more than a second before a blinding light-source entered it, washing everything else out.
‘You sure you can handle this?’ Sudjic said, as the door locked shut behind them. ‘You wouldn’t want to damage that suit. You break it, you bought it, you know?’
‘Concentrate on not damaging your own,’ Khouri said. Then she switched to the private channel, addressing Sudjic alone. ‘Maybe it’s just my imagination, but do I get the impression you don’t like me very much?’
‘Now why would you think that?’
‘I think it might have something to do with Nagorny.’ Khouri paused. It had occured to her that the private channels might not be private at all, but then again, nothing she was about to say would not already be completely obvious to anyone listening in; most especially not to Volyova. ‘I don’t know exactly what happened with him, except that you were close.’
‘Close isn’t the word for it, Khouri.’
‘Lovers, then. I wasn’t going to say that in case I offended you.’
‘Don’t worry about offending me, kid. It’s way too late for that.’
Volyova’s voice interrupted them. ‘Kick off and descend to the chamber wall, you three.’
They obeyed her, using their suits on mild amplification to jump away from the plate which capped the end of the cylinder. They had been in freefall from the moment they entered the place, but now, as they descended towards the wall/floor, and picked up circumferential speed, their sense of weight mounted. The change was small, cushioned within the gel-air, but it gave enough small cues to engender a sense of up and down.
‘I understand why you resent me,’ Khouri said.
‘Bet you do.’
‘I took his position. Filled his role. After . . . whatever happened to him, you suddenly had me to deal with.’ Khouri did her best to sound reasonable, as if she was taking none of this personally. ‘If I was in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same. In fact I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t make it right, either. I’m not your enemy, Sudjic.’
‘Don’t delude yourself.’
‘About what?’
‘That you understand one tenth of what this is about.’ Sudjic had positioned her suit close to Khouri’s now: seamless white armour stark against the damaged wall of the chamber. Khouri had seen images of ghostly white whales which lived - or used to live; she wasn’t sure - in Earth’s seas. Belugas, they were called, and they came to mind now. ‘Listen,’ Sudjic said. ‘Do you think I’m simplistic enough that I’d hate you just because you fill the space Boris left? Don’t insult me, Khouri.’
‘Not my intention, believe me.’
‘If I hate you, Khouri, it’s for a perfectly good reason. It’s because you belong to her.’ She emitted the last word as a gasp of pure animosity. ‘Volyova. You’re her trinket. I hate her, so naturally I hate her possessions. Especially those whom she values. And of course - if I found a way to harm one of her possessions - do you imagine I wouldn’t do it?’
‘I’m nobody’s possession,’ Khouri said. ‘Not Volyova’s; not anyone’s.’ She immediately hated herself for protesting so vigorously, and then began to hate Sudjic for pushing her to the cusp of this defensiveness. ‘Not that it’s any of your business. You know what, Sudjic?’
‘I’m dying to hear.’
‘From what I heard, Boris wasn’t the sanest individual who ever lived. From what I hear, Volyova didn’t so much drive him mad as try and use his madness for something constructive.’ She felt her suit decelerate, softly depositing her feet-first on the crumpled wall. ‘So it didn’t work. Big deal. Maybe you two deserved each other.’
‘Yeah, maybe we did.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t necessarily like anything that you just said, Khouri. Fact is, if we didn’t have company, and if we weren’t suited up, I might take a few moments to teach you how easily I could break your neck. Might still do it, one of these days. But I’ve got to admit. You’ve got spite. Most of her puppets usually lose that straight away; if she doesn’t fry them first.’
‘You’re saying you misjudged me? Excuse me if I don’t sound grateful.’
‘I’m saying maybe you aren’t as much her possession as she imagines.’ Sudjic laughed. ‘It’s not a compliment, kid - just an observation. It might be worse for you once she realises. It doesn’t mean you’re off my shit-list, either.’
Khouri might have replied, but anything she intended to say was drowned out by Volyova, who was again speaking over the general suit channel, addressing the three of them from her vantage point high above, near the chamber’s middle. ‘There is no structure to this exercise,’ she said. ‘At least none that you need know about. Your sole obligation is to stay alive until the scenario is over. That’s all there is to it. The exercise begins in ten seconds. I won’t be available for questions during the course of it.’
Khouri absorbed this without any undue worry. There had been many unstructured exercises on the Edge, and many more in the gunnery. All it meant was that the deeper purpose of the scenario was masked, or that it was - literally - an exercise in disorientation intended to represent the chaos which might follow an operation which had gone badly wrong.
They began with warm-up exercises. Volyova watched them from on high while a variety of drone-targets emerged from previously concealed trapdoors in the wall of the chamber. The targets were not much of a challenge; at least, not at first. At the beginning the suits retained enough autonomy to detect and react to the targets before the wearer had even noticed them, so that all the wearer needed to do was issue consent for the kill. But it became harder. The targets stopped being passive and began to shoot back - usually indiscriminately, but with steadily mounting firepower, so that even wide-shots posed a threat. The targets also got smaller and faster, popping out of the trapdoors with increasing frequency. And - keeping pace with the increasing danger posed by the enemy - the suits suffered progressive losses of functionality. By the sixth or seventh round most of the suit autonomy had been eroded, and the sensor webs which each suit draped around itself were breaking up, so that the wearers had to rely increasingly on their own visual cues. Yet though the exercise had increased in difficulty, Khouri had worked through similar scenarios so often that she did not begin to lose her cool. One had to remember how much of the suit functionality remained: one still had the weapons, the suit power and flight-capability.
The three of them did not communicate during the initial exercises; they were too intent on finding their own mental edges. Eventually it was like getting a second wind; a state of stability which lay beyond what at first seemed like the limits of normal performance. Getting there was a little like entering a trance state. There were certain tricks of concentration one could call into play: rote mantras which mediated the transition. It was never just a matter of wishing it and being there; it was more like climbing onto some awkward ledge. But as one did it - and did it over again - one found that the move became more fluid, and the ledge no longer seemed quite so high or inaccessible. But it was never reached simply, or without some expenditure of mental effort.
It
was during the ascension to that state that Khouri half thought she had seen the Mademoiselle.
It was not even a glimpse, just a peripheral awareness that - momentarily - there had been another body out there in the chamber, and that its shape might have been that of the Mademoiselle. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come.
Could it have been her?
Khouri had not seen or heard from the Mademoiselle since the incident in the gunnery room. The Mademoiselle’s last communiqué to her had been more pique than anything else; delivered after Khouri had helped Volyova finish off the cache-weapon. She had warned her that by remaining in the gunnery so long she had brought Sun Stealer on herself. And - indeed - the moment that Khouri tried to leave gunspace, she had felt something rushing towards her. It had come at her like a largening shadow, but she had not felt anything when the shadow seemed to engulf her. It was if a hole had opened in the shadow and she had passed unscathed through it, but she doubted that that had really been the case. The truth was almost certainly less palatable. Khouri did not want to consider the possibility that the shadow might have been Sun Stealer, but it was a conclusion she could not ignore. And in accepting that, she also had to accept the likelihood that Sun Stealer had now managed to ensconce a much larger part of himself in her skull.
It had been bad enough knowing that a small part of that thing had come back with the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds. But that at least had been contained; it had been within the Mademoiselle’s powers to hold him at bay. Now Khouri had to accept that a more substantial fragment of Sun Stealer had reached her. And the Mademoiselle had been curiously absent ever since - until this voiceless half-glimpse, which might have been nothing at all; less than a figment of her imagination; something which any sane person would have dismissed as a trick of the light at the edge of vision.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 35