The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  If it had been her . . . what did it mean, after all this time?

  Eventually the initial phase of exercises finished, and some of the suit functionality was reinstated. Not everything, but enough to let the three of them know that a certain slate had been wiped clean, and that from now the rules would be different.

  ‘All right,’ Volyova said. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘I’d take that as a compliment,’ Khouri said, hoping to elicit some vague camaraderie from her compatriots. ‘But the trouble with Ilia is she means it literally.’

  ‘At least one of you gets it,’ Volyova said. ‘But don’t let it go to your head, Khouri. Especially as it’s about to get serious.’

  At the far end of the chamber another clamshell door was easing open. Because of the constantly shifting light, Khouri saw what happened more as a series of frozen, glare-saturated images than actual motion. Things were spilling out: an expanding mass of ellipsoidal objects, each perhaps half a metre long, metallic-white in colour, with various protrusions, gun-nozzles, manipulators and apertures interrupting its surface.

  Sentry drones. She knew them - or something similar - from the Edge. They had called them wolfhounds, because of the ferocity of their attack, and the fact they always moved in packs. Although their main military use was as an instrument of demoralisation, Khouri knew what they could do, and she knew that wearing a suit was no guarantee of safety. Wolfhounds were built for viciousness, not intelligence. They carried relatively light weapons - but they did so in large numbers, and, more to the point, they acted in unison. A pack of wolfhounds could collectively target their fire against a single individual, if their pooled-processors deemed that the action was strategically useful. It was that singlemindedness which made them terrifying.

  But there was more. Embedded in the mass of erupting drones were several larger objects, also metallic-white in colour, but lacking the spherical symmetry of the wolfhounds. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the intermittent bursts of illumination, but Khouri thought she knew what they were. They were other suits, and they were very unlikely to be friendly.

  The wolfhounds and the enemy suits were dropping away from the central axis now, vectoring towards the three waiting trainees. Perhaps two seconds had elapsed since the other door had opened, but it had seemed much longer as Khouri’s mind easily switched to the mode of rapid consciousness which combat demanded. Many of the suit’s higher autonomous functions were disabled, but its target-acquisition routines were still operable, so she ordered the suit to lock onto the wolfhounds, not actually firing, but keeping a bead on each one. She knew that her suit would confer with its two partners; between them devising a moment-by-moment strategy and allocating targets to each other, but that process was largely invisible to the wearer.

  Where the hell was Volyova?

  Was it possible she could have moved from one end of the chamber to the other, in time to appear in the pack? Yes, probably - motion in a suit, at least on a scale this compressed, could be so rapid that a person might seem to disappear from one point and appear hundreds of metres further away an eyeblink later. But the enemy suits Khouri had seen had definitely come through the other door, which would have necessitated Volyova leaving the chamber and making her way to the other end through normal ship corridors and accessways. Even in a suit, even with the route keyed in beforehand, Khouri doubted that anyone could do that so quickly; not without becoming liquid en route. But maybe Volyova had a short-cut; a clear shaft through which she could move much more rapidly . . .

  Shit.

  Khouri was being shot at.

  The wolfhounds were firing, lancing her with small-grade laser fire, emerging in twin beams from malignant, closely spaced eyes in the upper hemisphere of their ellipsoid shells. By now their chameleoflage had adapted to the floor metal, turning them into purple lozenges which seemed to dance in and out of clarity. Her suit skin had silvered to an optically perfect mirror, deflecting most of the energy, but some of the initial blasts had done real damage to the suit integrity. She would lose points for that - she had been too busy cogitating on Volyova’s vanishing act to pay attention to the attack. That diversion, of course, had almost certainly been Volyova’s intention. She looked around, confirming what the suit readouts were telling her, which was that her compatriots had all survived. Flanking her, Sudjic and Kjarval resembled androform blobs of mercury, but they were not hurt and were returning fire.

  Khouri set her escalation protocols to stay one offensive step ahead of the enemy, but not to obliterate them. Her suit sprouted low-yield lasers, popping up on both shoulders, pivoting on turrets. She watched the beams converge ahead of her, knifing forwards, each burst leaving a lilac contrail of ionised air. When hit, the shining, flying purple wolfhounds tended to crash out of the sky, bouncing to the ground or just exploding in hot blossoms. It would have been unwise in the extreme to be out in the chamber without a suit.

  ‘You were slow,’ Sudjic said, on the general-suit, even as the attack continued. ‘This was real, we’d be hosing you off the walls.’

  ‘How many times you seen close-quarters action, Sudjic?’

  Kjarval - who until then had said next to nothing - cut in on them. ‘We’ve all seen action, Khouri.’

  ‘Yeah? And did you ever get close enough to the enemy to hear them scream for mercy?’

  ‘What I mean is . . . fuck.’ Kjarval had just taken a hit. Her suit spasmed momentarily, flicking through a series of incorrect chameleoflage modes: space-black; snow-white and then florid, tropical foliage, making it look as if Kjarval were a door leading out of the chamber into the heart of some remote planetary jungle.

  Her suit stammered, and then regained its reflective sheen.

  ‘I’m worried about those other suits.’

  ‘That’s what they’re for. To make you worry, and louse up.’

  ‘We need help to louse up? That’s a new one.’

  ‘Shut it, Khouri. Just concentrate on the damned war.’

  She did. That part was easy.

  Roughly a third of the attacking wolfhounds had been shot down, and no new forces were emerging through the chamber’s still-open end door. But the other suits - there were three of them, Khouri saw - had done nothing so far except loiter near the hole, and were now slowly moving towards the floor, correcting their descent with bursts of needle-thin thrust from their heels. As they did so they too assumed a colour and texture which matched the shot-up floor. It was impossible to tell which - if any - were occupied.

  ‘This is part of the scenario; those suits - they’ve got to mean something.’

  ‘I said shut it, Khouri.’

  But she continued, ‘We’re on a mission, right? We have to assume that much. We have to impose some structure on the damned thing or we don’t know who the hell’s the enemy!’

  ‘Good idea,’ Sudjic said. ‘Let’s schedule a meeting.’

  By now the wolfhounds, and their fire-returning suits, were using particle-beams. Maybe the lasers had been real - it was just within the bounds of possibility - but it seemed certain that any significantly more powerful weapon would be only simulated. After all, it would not be an auspicious end to the exercise if one of them blasted a hole in the chamber wall and vented all the air into space.

  ‘Let’s assume,’ Khouri said, ‘that we know who the hell we are and why we’re here - wherever here happens to be. The next question is, do we know those bastards in the other three suits?’

  ‘This is getting way too philosophical for me,’ Kjarval said, loping away to draw fire.

  ‘If we’re having this conversation,’ Khouri said, doggedly talking over Sudjic’s interjections, ‘then we have to assume we don’t know who they are. That they’re hostile. And that means we should shoot the scum first, before they do whatever they’re going to do to us.’

  ‘I think you could be fucking up big-time, Khouri.’

  ‘Yeah, well, as you kindly pointed out, I’m the one who isn�
�t going down anyway.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  ‘Er . . . people . . .’ This was Kjarval, who had noticed what it took Khouri and Sudjic another moment to absorb. ‘I don’t like the look of that.’

  What she had seen was that the wrists of the three other suits were morphing, each extruding an as yet unformed weapon. The process was unnervingly rapid, like watching a party balloon inflate into the shape of an animal.

  ‘Shoot the fuckers,’ Khouri said, with a voice so calm it almost scared her. ‘Full fire-convergence on the leftmost suit. Go to minimum-yield ack-am pulse mode, conic dispersal with lateral cross-sweep.’

  ‘Since when are you giving . . .’

  ‘Just fucking do it, Sudjic!’

  But she was already firing, Kjarval too; the three of them were now standing apart by ten metres, directing their suits’ fire towards the enemy. The accelerated antimatter pulses were simulated . . . of course. If they had been real, there would have been little of the chamber left to stand on.

  There was a flash, one so bright that Khouri felt it reach out and push taloned fingers into her eyes. It felt too intense to have been properly simulated . . . too concussive. The noise of the blast hit with a force that seemed almost gentle by comparison, but the shock was still enough to throw her backwards, keeling into the mottled chamber wall. The bump was like bouncing onto a mattress in an expensive hotel room. For a moment her suit was out cold; even when her eyes began to clear she could see that the readouts had either died or turned to unreadably cryptic mush. They lingered in that state for a few agonising seconds before the suit’s back-up brain staggered on line, reinstating what it could. A simpler - but at least comprehensible - display returned to life, detailing what remained and what had been destroyed. Most of the major weapons were out. Suit autonomy was down by fifty per cent, the persona slipping towards machine autism. There was extensive loss of servo-assistance in three articulation points. Flight capability was impaired, at least until the repair protocols could get to work, and they needed a minimum two hours to finesse a bypass solution.

  Oh, and - according to the bio-medical readout - she was now minus one upper limb, from the elbow down.

  She struggled to a sitting position and - though every instinct told her to spend the time getting safe and assessing the surroundings - she had to look at the shot-away limb. Her right arm ended just where the med-readout said it would; truncating in a crumpled mass of scorched bone, flesh and intermingled metal. Further up the stump, the gel-air would have shock-congealed to prevent pressure and blood loss, but that was a detail she had to take for granted. There was no pain, of course - another aspect in which the simulation was utterly realistic, since the suit would be telling her pain centre to shut down for the time being.

  Assess, assess . . .

  She had lost her orientation completely in the blast. She looked around, but the suit’s head articulation was jammed. There was suddenly an awful lot of smoke out there; hanging in coils in the air venting from the chamber itself. The intermittent illumination provided by the aerial drones was now only a stuttering strobe-effect. There were the wrecks of two suits over there, suffering the kind of comprehensive damage which might indicate that they had been hit by combined ack-am pulses. But the suits were too mangled up for her to tell if they had - or had ever had - occupants. A third suit - less critically damaged, and perhaps only stunned, as her own had been - rested ten or fifteen metres away around the great curve of the chamber’s scarred wall. The wolfhounds were gone, or destroyed; it was impossible to tell which.

  ‘Sudjic? Kjarval?’

  Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now - a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.

  Now she had no idea who the enemy was.

  The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was medevacked out of the zone.

  The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?

  The single suit with the weapons was approaching her, very slowly, as if she were a bomb which might go off at any moment. The suit stopped, motionless. Its skin was trying to mimic the combination of the background colour of the chamber wall and the smoke screens, with only moderate success. Khouri wondered how her own suit was doing. Was her faceplate opaque or transparent? It was impossible to tell from inside, and the minimalist readout told her nothing. If the one with the weapons saw a human face within, would that incite it to kill or hold fire? Khouri had locked her own usable weapons on the figure, but nothing she had seen told her whether she was pointed at the enemy or a mute comrade.

  She moved to raise her good arm, to indicate her face, asking the other to make its faceplate transparent.

  The other fired.

  Khouri was blown back into the wall, an invisible piledriver ramming into her stomach. Her suit started screaming, all manner of gibberish scrolling across her vision. There was a roar of sound before she hit the wall, the compressed burst of a frantic return-fire from her own available weapons.

  Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.

  She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What the fuck is happening?’

  The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.

  ‘This is Volyova,’ said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. ‘Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing—’

  Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.

  It’s gone live, she thought.

  The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her.

  ‘Kjarval,’ Volyova said. ‘Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!’

  But Kjarval - Khouri guessed that she was the attacker - was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.

  ‘Kjarval,’ the Triumvir said again, ‘if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!’

  But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.

  And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fi
re upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.

  Eventually - it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri - Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding - and then budding off - various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.

  Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.

  Volyova and another suited figure - she had to be Sudjic - were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Volyova said.

  FOURTEEN

  Mantell, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, 2566

  On the day that the newcomers announced their presence, Sylveste was woken by a stab of unforgiving white light. He held his arm up in supplication while he waited for his eyes to cycle through their initialisation routines. It was almost useless speaking to him in those moments; Sluka evidently realised this. With so many of their original functions gone, the eyes took longer than ever now to reach functionality. Sylveste experienced a slow rote of errors and warnings, little spectral prickles of pain as the eyes investigated critically impaired modes.