At twenty kilometres’ altitude the suits used their thrusters to drop to merely supersonic speeds. Now they remoulded themselves to adapt to the thickening atmosphere, transforming into human-sized aircraft. The suits grew stabilising fins along their backs, and the face parts again returned to transparency. Snug in the suit’s embrace, Khouri barely felt these changes, only a slight pressure from the surrounding suit material which nudged her limbs from one position to another.
At fifteen kilometres, the sixth suit broke formation and went hypersonic, configuring itself into an aerodynamically optimum shape into which no human could have fitted without drastic surgery. It disappeared over the horizon in a few seconds, probably moving faster than any artificial object which had ever entered Resurgam’s atmosphere, exerting upward thrust to keep itself from escaping from the planet entirely. Khouri knew that the suit was heading to pick up Sajaki - it would meet with him near the designated site where he had last communicated with the ship, now that his work on Resurgam was complete.
At ten kilometres - maintaining silence, even though the comlaser links between the suits were totally secure - they hit the first traces of the razorstorm Volyova had stirred to life. From space it had looked black and impenetrable, like a plateau of ash. Inside, there was more illumination than Khouri had expected. The light was gritty and sepia, like a bad afternoon in Chasm City. A muddyish rainbow haloed the sun, and then that too vanished as they sank deeper into the storm. Now light did not so much stream down to them as stumble haphazardly, navigating layer upon layer of elevated dust like a drunkard descending stairs. Since there was no feeling of weight in the gel-air, Khouri rapidly lost all sensation of up and down, but she instinctively trusted the suit’s own inertial systems to figure things out. Now and again - even though the thrusters were trying to smooth out the ride - she felt lurches as the suit hit a pressure cell. As the speed of the ensemble dropped below that of sound, the suits reconfigured again, becoming more statuesque. The ground was only a few kilometres below, and the highest peaks of the mesa system were only hundreds of metres under them, though they remained unseen. It was increasingly hard now to make out the other four suits in the formation; they kept fading in and out of the dust.
Khouri began to get a little concerned. She had never used a suit in conditions anything like this. ‘Suit,’ she asked. ‘Are you quite sure you can handle this stuff? I wouldn’t want you dropping out of the sky on me.’
‘Wearer,’ it said, managing to sound sniffy. ‘When the dust becomes a problem I shall immediately inform you of that fact.’
‘All right; just asking.’
Now there was hardly anything to see. It was like swimming through mud. There were occasional rents in the storm which afforded glimpses of towering canyon and mesa walls, but most of the time the dust was completely featureless. ‘Can’t see anything,’ she said.
‘Is this an improvement?’
It was. The storm had casually blinked out of existence. She could see around her for tens of kilometres; all the way to the relatively near horizon, where it was unobstructed by closer rock walls. It was just like flying on a dazzlingly clear day, except that the entire scene was rendered in sickly variations of pale green. ‘A montage,’ the suit said. ‘Constructed from ambient infrared, interpolated random-pulse/snapshot sonar and gravimetric data.’
‘Very nice, but don’t get cocky about it. When I get annoyed with machines, even very sophisticated ones, I have a nasty habit of abusing them.’
‘Duly noted,’ the suit said, shutting up.
She called up an overlay which gave her some idea where she was on a larger scale. The suit knew exactly where to go - homing in on the coordinates where Sylveste had called from - but it made her feel more professional to actually take an active interest in things. Three and a half hours had passed now since Volyova and Sylveste had spoken, which, assuming he was on foot, would not allow Sylveste to get seriously far from the agreed rendezvous point. Even if, for some reason, he now tried to evade the pick-up, the suit’s sensors would have no trouble locating him, unless he had found a conveniently deep cave in which to ensconce himself: but then the suit’s detector systems would do their level best to track him down, using the thermal and biochemical evidence he would have unavoidably left behind on his route.
‘Listen up,’ Volyova said, using the intersuit com for the first time since they had entered the atmosphere. ‘We’ll be at the reception point in two minutes. I’ve just had a signal from orbit. Triumvir Sajaki’s suit has located him and made successful pick-up. He’s currently en route to meet us, but because his suit can’t move so quickly now he won’t make it for another ten minutes.’
‘He’s meeting us?’ Khouri asked. ‘Why doesn’t he just return to the ship? Doesn’t he believe we can do the job without him breathing down our necks?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Sudjic asked. ‘Sajaki’s waited years - decades - for this. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘Sylveste won’t put up a struggle, will he?’
‘Not unless he’s feeling incredibly lucky,’ Volyova said. ‘But don’t take anything for granted. I’ve dealt with this bastard before; you two haven’t.’
Khouri felt her suit slither to a configuration very similar to the one it had first had aboard the ship. The wing membrane had vanished entirely now, and her limbs were properly defined and articulated, rather than just being flattened winglike appendages. The tips of the arms had bifurcated into mittenlike claws, but a more developed hand could be formed, if she needed to do delicate manipulations. Now she was tipping back into a near-vertical posture, while still moving forwards. The suit was now maintaining altitude solely by thrust, utterly impervious to the dust.
‘One minute,’ Volyova said. ‘Altitude two hundred metres. Expect visual acquisition of Sylveste any moment now. And remember we’ll also be looking for his wife; I doubt they’ll be far apart.’
Tiring of the pale-green false image, Khouri reverted to normal vision. She could hardly make out the other suits. They were now a long way from the canyon walls of any major rock features or crevasses. The terrain was flat for thousands of metres in any direction, apart from the odd boulder or gully. But even when pockets opened in the storm, calm ventricles in the chaos, it was impossible to see more than a few tens of metres, and the ground was ceaselessly aswirl in dust eddies. Yet in the suit it was totally cool and silent, lending the whole situation a dangerous air of unreality. If she had wished it, the suit could have relayed the ambient sound to her, but it would have told her nothing except that it was hellishly windy out there.
She returned to the pale-green.
‘Ilia,’ she said. ‘I’m still weaponless here. Starting to feel a bit itchy.’
‘Give her something to play with,’ Sudjic said. ‘It can’t hurt, can it? She can go away and shoot some rocks while we take care of Sylveste.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘In spades, Khouri. Didn’t it occur to you I might be trying to do you a favour? Or do you think you can persuade Ilia all on your lonesome?’
‘All right Khouri,’ Volyova said. ‘I’m enabling your minimal-volition defence protocols. That suit you?’
Not exactly, no. While Khouri’s suit had now been given the autonomous privileges to defend itself against external threats - even, to some extent, to act proactively towards that goal - Khouri still did not have her finger on the trigger. And that might prove to be a problem if she wanted to kill Sylveste, which was an objective she had not entirely jettisoned.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said. ‘Excuse me if I don’t whoop for joy.’
‘My pleasure . . .’
A second or so later they landed, soft as five feathers. Khouri felt a shiver as her suit depowered its thrusters, then made a further series of minute readjustments to its anatomy. The status readouts had now flicked over from flight to ambulatory mode, signifying that she could, if she wished, walk around normally. At this point she could eve
n ditch the suit entirely, but without protective gear she would not have lasted long in the razorstorm. She was more than happy to remain encased in the suit’s silence, even if it meant that she did not feel entirely participatory.
‘We split,’ Volyova said. ‘Khouri; I’m assigning control of the two empty suits to your own; they’ll shadow you when you move. The three of us move apart for one hundred paces; initiate active sensor sweep in all EM and supplemental bands. If Sylveste is anywhere nearby we’ll find the svinoi.’
The two empty suits had shuffled next to Khouri already, latching onto her like stray dogs. This was, she knew, definitely the short straw choice; Volyova was letting her look after the empty units as a consolation prize for not being better armed. But there was no point whining. Her only reasonable argument for being properly armed was so that she could use those defences to kill Sylveste. It was probably not an argument which would prove entirely effective against Volyova. Still, it was worth bearing in mind that the suits could be deadly even without their armaments. In training on Sky’s Edge, she had been shown how someone wearing a suit could inflict damage on an enemy by the exertion of sheer brute force, literally tearing an opponent apart.
Khouri watched Sudjic and Volyova move off in their respective directions, walking with the deceptively plodding slowness of the suits in their default ambulatory modes. Deceptive, because the suits were capable of moving with gazelle-like speed if required, but there was no need to deploy such swiftness at the moment. She switched off the pale-green overlay, returning to normal vision. Sudjic and Volyova were not visible at all now, unsurprisingly. And while occasional pockets continued to open in the storm, Khouri was generally unable to see beyond the end of her own outstretched arm.
With a jolt, though, she realised she had seen something - someone - moving in the dust. It had only been there for a moment; not even something she could properly dignify by calling it a glimpse. Khouri was just beginning - without too much concern - to rationalise the apparition as a chance swirling of dust, momentarily assuming a vaguely human shape. But then she saw it again.
Now the figure was better defined. It lingered, teasingly. And stepped out of the maelstrom, into clear vision.
‘It’s been a long time,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘I thought you’d be happier to see me.’
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Wearer,’ the suit said. ‘I am not able to interpret your last subvocalised statement. Would you mind rephrasing what you had to say?’
‘Tell it to ignore you,’ the Mademoiselle’s dust-ghost said. ‘I don’t have very long.’
Khouri told the suit to ignore what she was subvocalising, until she gave a codeword. The suit acceded with a note of stuffy displeasure, as if it had never ever been asked to do something so irregular, and that it would have to seriously rethink the terms of their working relationship in future.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s just you and me, Mad. Care to tell where you’ve been?’
‘In a moment,’ the woman’s projected image said. She had stabilised now, but was certainly not rendered with the fidelity Khouri had come to expect. She looked more like a crude sketch of herself, or a blurred photograph, subject to rippling waves of distortion. ‘Firstly I’d better do what I can for you, or else you’ll be forced into foolishness like trying to ram Sylveste. Now let’s see; accessing primary suit systems . . . bypassing Volyova’s restriction codes . . . remarkably simple, in fact - I’m rather disappointed she didn’t give me more of a challenge, especially as this is the last time I’m likely—’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about giving you firepower, dear girl.’ As she was speaking, the status-readouts reconfigured, indicating that a number of previously locked-out suit weapons systems had just come online. Khouri appraised the sudden arsenal at her fingertips, only half believing what she had just witnessed. ‘There you are,’ Mademoiselle said. ‘Anything else you’d like me to kiss better before I go?’
‘I suppose I should say thanks . . .’
‘Don’t bother, Khouri. The last thing I’d expect from you would be gratitude.’
‘Of course, now I actually have no choice but to kill the bastard. Am I supposed to thank you for that as well?’
‘You’ve seen the - uh - evidence. The case for the prosecution, if you will.’
Khouri nodded, feeling her scalp squidging against the suit’s internal matrix. You were not meant to make gestures in a suit. ‘Yes, that stuff about the Inhibitors. ’Course, I still don’t know if any of it’s true . . .’
‘Consider the alternative, in that case. You refrain from killing Sylveste, and yet what I’ve told you turns out to be the truth. Imagine how bad you’d feel after that, especially if Sylveste,’ the dust apparition attempted a grisly smile, ‘fulfils his ambition.’
‘I’d still have a clear conscience, wouldn’t I?’
‘Undoubtedly. And I hope that would be sufficient consolation while your entire species is being eradicated by Inhibitor systems. Of course, in all likelihood you wouldn’t even be around to regret your mistake. They’re rather efficient, the Inhibitors. But you’ll find that out in due course . . .’
‘Well, thanks for the advice.’
‘That isn’t all, Khouri. Did it not occur to you that there might have been a very good reason for my absence until now?’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m dying.’ The Mademoiselle let the word hover in the dust storm before continuing. ‘After the incident with the cache-weapon, Sun Stealer managed to inject another portion of himself into your skull - but of course, you’re aware of that. You felt him enter, didn’t you? I remember your screams. They were graphic. How odd it must have felt; how invasive.’
‘Sun Stealer hasn’t exactly made an impression on me since.’
‘But did it ever occur to you to ask why?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, dear girl, that I’ve spent the last few weeks doing my damnedest to stop him spreading further into your head. That’s why you haven’t heard anything from me. I’ve been too preoccupied with containing him. It was bad enough dealing with the part of him that I inadvertently let return with the bloodhounds. But at least then we reached a kind of stalemate. This time, though, it’s been rather different. Sun Stealer has become stronger, while I have become successively weaker with each of his onslaughts.’
‘You mean he’s still here?’
‘Very much so. And the only reason you haven’t heard from him is that he’s been equally preoccupied in the war the two of us have been waging within your skull. The difference is, he’s been making progress all the time - corrupting me, co-opting my systems, exploiting my own defences against me. Oh, he’s a crafty one, take my word for it.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘What’s going to happen is that I’m going to lose. I can be quite certain about this; it’s a mathematical certainty based on his current rate of gains.’ The Mademoiselle smiled again, as if she were perversely proud of this analytical detachment. ‘I can delay his onslaught for a few days more, and then it’s all over. It might even be shorter. I’ve significantly weakened myself just by the act of presenting myself to you now. But I had no choice. I had to sacrifice time in order to reinstate your weapons privilege.’
‘But when he wins . . .’
‘I don’t know, Khouri. But be prepared for anything. He’s likely to be a rather less charming tenant than I’ve endeavoured to be. After all, you know what he did to your predecessor. Drove the poor man psychotic.’ The Mademoiselle stepped back, seeming to partially cloak herself in the dust, as if she were stepping offstage via the curtains. ‘It’s doubtful that we’ll have the pleasure again, Khouri. I feel I should wish you well. But right now I ask only one thing of you. Do what you came here to do. And do it well.’ She retreated further, her form breaking up, as if she were no more than a charcoal sketch of a woman, disper
sed by wind. ‘You have the means now.’
The Mademoiselle was gone. Khouri waited a moment - not so much collecting her thoughts as kicking them into some vaguely cohesive mass which she hoped might stay bundled together for more than a few seconds. Then she issued the codeword which put the suit back online. The weapons, she observed with nothing remotely resembling relief, were all still functioning, just as the Mademoiselle had promised.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ the suit said. ‘But if you’d care to reinstate full-spectrum vision you’ll observe that we have company. ’
‘Company?’
‘I’ve just alerted the other suits. But you’re the closest.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 41