But all of this became incidental when they found the thing around Hades.
It was, beyond any possible doubt, artefactual. It had been placed there by another civilisation, uncountable millions of years in the past. It seemed to actively invite them to enter its mysteries. So they began to explore it.
And that was when their problems began.
‘It was an Inhibitor device,’ Pascale said. ‘That was what they found, wasn’t it?’
‘It had been waiting there for millions of years,’ Khouri said. ‘All the time they were evolving from what we’d think of as dinosaurs, or birds. All the time they spent reaching towards intelligence; learning to use tools; discovering fire . . .’
‘Just waiting,’ Volyova echoed. Behind her, the tactical display had been pulsing red for many minutes now, indicating that the shuttle had now fallen within the theoretical maximum range of the lighthugger’s beam weapons. A kill at this distance would be difficult but not impossible, and neither would it be swift. She continued, ‘Waiting for something recognisably intelligent to enter its vicinity - at which point it doesn’t strike out mindlessly; doesn’t destroy them. Because that would defeat the point. What it does is encourage them in, so it can learn as much about them as possible. Where they come from. What kind of technology they have, how they think, how they co-operate and communicate.’
‘Gathering intelligence.’
‘Yes.’ Volyova’s voice was as dolorous as a church bell. ‘It’s patient, you see. But sooner or later there comes a point when it decides that it has all the intelligence it needs. And then - only then - it acts.’
Now the three of them were on common ground. ‘Which is why the Amarantin died out,’ Pascale said, wonderingly. ‘It did something to their sun; tampered with it, triggered something like a vast coronal mass ejection; just enough to scour Resurgam clean of life, and cause a phase of cometary-infall for a few hundred thousand years.’
‘Ordinarily the Inhibitors wouldn’t go to such drastic lengths,’ Volyova said. ‘But in this case they’d left it far too late for anything less. And even that wasn’t sufficient, of course; the Banished were already spaceborn. They had to be hunted down; across tens of light-years, if necessary.’
Again there was a chime from the hull sensors, warning of a directed radar scan. Another chime followed soon after; evidence that the pursuing ship was narrowing its focus.
‘The Inhibitor device around Hades must have alerted others, elsewhere,’ Khouri said, trying to ignore the mechanised prophecies of imminent doom. ‘Transmitted the intelligence it had gathered, warning them to be on the lookout for the Banished.’
‘It can’t have simply been a case of sitting around waiting for them to show up,’ Volyova said. ‘The machines must have switched over from passivity to something more active - replicating hunting machines, for instance, programmed with the templates of the Banished. No matter which direction the Banished turned to flee, light would have outraced them, and Inhibitor systems would always be one step ahead, alert and waiting.’
‘They wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘But it can’t have been instantaneous extinction,’ Pascale said. ‘The Banished had time to return to Resurgam; time to preserve what they could of the old culture. Even if they knew they were being hunted down, and that the sun was in the process of destroying their homeworld.’
‘Maybe it took ten years; maybe a century.’ The way Volyova spoke, it was obvious she didn’t think it made a great deal of difference. ‘All we know is that some managed to get further than others.’
‘But none survived,’ Pascale said. ‘Did they?’
‘Some did,’ Khouri said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Behind Volyova, the tactical display began to shriek.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Cerberus Interior, 2567
The final shell was hollow.
It had taken him three days to reach it; a day since he had left Sajaki’s bodyless suit on the floor of the third shell, more than five hundred kilometres above him now. If he stopped to think about those distances, he knew, he would go quietly mad, so he carefully quarantined them from his thoughts. Simply being in an entirely alien environment was troubling enough; he did not wish to compound his fear with an additional dose of claustrophobia. Yet his quarantining was not complete, so that behind every thought there was a nagging background of crushing fright, the thought that at any instant some action he did would cause the delicate equilibria of this place to shift catastrophically, bringing down that vast, impossible ceiling.
With each inward layer he seemed to pass through a subtly different phase of Amarantin construction methodology. History, too, he supposed - but nothing was ever that simple. The levels did not seem to get systematically more or less advanced as he penetrated deeper, but rather evinced different philosophies; different approaches. It was as if the first Amarantin to arrive here had found something (what, he had not yet begun to guess) and had taken the decision to englobe it in an artificial shell armoured and capable of defending itself. Then another group must have arrived and elected to englobe that, perhaps because they believed their fortifications were more secure. The last of all had taken the process one logical step further, by camouflaging their fortifications so that they did not resemble anything artificial at all. It was impossible to guess over what timescales this layering had taken place, so he studiously avoided doing so. Maybe the different layers had been emplaced almost simultaneously - or perhaps the process had been drawn out over the thousands of years between Sun Stealer’s departure with the Banished Ones, and his godlike return.
Naturally, he had been less than comforted by what he found in Sajaki’s suit.
‘He was never there,’ Calvin said, filling in his thoughts. ‘All the while you thought he was in the suit, he wasn’t. The suit was empty. No wonder he never let you get too close.’
‘Sneaky bastard.’
‘I’ll say. But it wasn’t actually Sajaki being a sneaky bastard, was it?’
Sylveste was desperately trying to find another way to explain this paradox, but was failing at every attempt. ‘But if not Sajaki . . .’ He trailed off, remembering how he had not actually seen the Triumvir in person before they departed the ship. Sajaki had called him from the clinic, but he had no reason to believe that had really been Sajaki.
‘Listen, something was driving that suit until it crashed.’ Calvin was doing his favourite trick of sounding absurdly calm, despite the situation. But he lacked the usual bravado. ‘I’d say there’s only one logical culprit.’
‘Sun Stealer.’ Sylveste said the words experimentally, testing the idea for its repulsiveness. It was no less bitter than he had imagined it would be. ‘It was him, wasn’t it? Khouri had it right all along.’
‘I’d say that at this juncture we’d be staggeringly foolish to reject that hypothesis. Do you want me to continue?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said. ‘Not just yet. Give me a moment to think things through, then you can inflict all the pious wisdom on me you see fit.’
‘What’s there to think through?’
‘I’d have thought it was obvious. Whether we go on or not.’
The decision had not been one of the simpler ones in his life. Now he knew that, for all or part of this, he had been manipulated. How deep had that manipulation gone? Had it extended to his very powers of reason? Had his thought processes been subjugated towards this one end for most of his life in fact, since returning from Lascaille’s Shroud? Had he really died out there, and returned to Yellowstone as some kind of automaton, acting and feeling like his old self, but really directed towards one goal only, which was now on the point of being achieved? And did it honestly matter?
After all, no matter which way he cut it, no matter how false these feelings were, no matter how irrational the logic, this was the place he had always wanted to be.
He could not go back; not yet.
Not until he knew.
‘Svinoi pig-dog,’ Volyova said.
The first graser burst had hit the nose of the shuttle thirty seconds after the tactical attack siren had begun to shriek; barely enough time to throw off a cloud of ablative chaff, designed to dissipate the initial energies of the incoming gamma-ray photons. Just before the flightdeck windows rendered themselves opaque, Volyova saw a silver flash, as sacrificial hull armour vanished in a gasp of excited metal ions. The structural shock rammed through the fuselage like a concussion charge. More sirens joined in the threnody, and a vast acreage of the tactical display switched over to offensive mode, graphing up weapons readiness data.
Useless; all of it useless. The Melancholia’s defences were simply too small-scale, too short-range, to have any chance against the pursuing megatonnage of the lighthugger. Hardly surprising; some of the Infinity’s guns were larger than the shuttle, and those were probably the ones that it had not yet bothered deploying.
Cerberus was a grey immensity, filling a third of the sky from the shuttle’s perspective. By now they should be decelerating, yet they were busy wasting precious seconds being fried. Even if they fought off the attack, they would be moving uncomfortably fast . . .
More of the hull vaporised.
She let her fingers do the talking, typing in a programmed evasive pattern that would undoubtedly get them out of the immediate focus of the graser onslaught. The only trouble was, it depended on sustaining thrust at ten gees.
She executed the routine, and almost immediately blacked out.
The chamber was hollow, but not empty.
Three hundred kilometres wide, Sylveste guessed it to be, though that was sheer guesswork, because his suit radar stubbornly refused to come up with a consistent distance for the diameter of the chamber, no matter how many readings he asked it to make. No doubt what was in the middle of the chamber was causing his suit difficulty. He could understand that. The thing was causing him difficulty as well, though in perhaps not quite the same way. It was giving him a headache.
In fact, there were two of them, and he wasn’t sure which was the stranger. They were moving, or rather one of them was, locked in orbit around the other. The one that moved was like a gem, but it was a gem so complicated, and so constantly in flux, that it was impossible to describe its shape, or even its colour and lustre from moment to moment. All he knew was that it was large - tens of kilometres wide, it seemed - but again, when he asked the suit to confirm this, it was unable to give him a coherent reply. He might as well have asked the suit to comment on the subtext of a piece of free-form haiku, for all the sense it gave him.
He tried to enlarge it with his eyes’ zoom faculty, but it seemed to defy enlargement, if anything growing smaller when he examined it under magnification. Something seriously strange had happened to spacetime in the vicinity of that jewel.
Next, he tried to record a snapshot of it using his eyes’ image capture facility, but that failed as well, and what the image showed was something paradoxically more blurred than what he appeared to see in realtime, as if the object were changing more rapidly on small timescales - more thoroughly - than on timescales of seconds or longer. He tried to hold this concept in his head and for a moment thought he might have succeeded, but the illusion of understanding was only fleeting.
And the other thing . . .
The other thing, the stationary thing . . . if anything, this was worse.
It was like a gash in reality, a gaping hole from which erupted white light from the mouth of infinity. The light was intense, more intense and pure than any he had known or dreamt of - like the light which the near-dead spoke of, beckoning them to the afterlife. He too felt the light was beckoning. It was so bright he should have been blinded. But the more he looked into its fulgent depths, the less it seemed to glare; the more it became only a tranquil, fathomless whiteness.
The light refracted through the orbiting gem, casting varicoloured, constantly shifting slabs of illumination on the chamber walls. It was beautiful; intense and ever-shifting, beguiling.
‘At this point,’ Calvin said, ‘I think a little humility may be in order. You’re impressed, aren’t you?’
‘Of course.’ If he spoke, he did not hear his own words. But Calvin seemed to understand.
‘And this is enough, isn’t it? I mean, now you know what it was they had to conceal from us. Something so strange . . . God only knows what it is . . .’
‘Perhaps that’s just what it is. God.’
‘Staring into that light, I almost believe you.’
‘You feel it too, is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’m not sure what I feel. I’m not sure I like it, either.’
Sylveste said, ‘Do you think they made this, or was it something they happened to find?’
‘This is a first - you asking my opinion.’ Calvin seemed to deliberate, but his answer was hardly surprising when it came. ‘They never made this, Dan. They were clever - maybe even cleverer than us. But the Amarantin were never gods.’
‘Someone else, then.’
‘Someone I hope we never meet.’
‘Then hold your breath, because for all I know, we’re about to.’
Weightless, he jetted the suit into the chamber, towards the dancing jewel and the source of searingly beautiful light.
When Volyova came around, it was to the sound of the radar warning siren, which meant that the Infinity was preparing to re-aim its grasers. It would not take it more than a few seconds to do so, even allowing for her random-walk evasive manoeuvre. She glanced at the hull health indicator and saw that they were down to only a few remaining millimetres of sacrificial metal, that the chaff throwers were depleted, and that - realistically - they could withstand no more than one or two additional bursts of graser-strike.
‘Are we still here?’ Khouri asked, seemingly astonished that she was even capable of framing the question.
One more strike and the hull would start outgassing in a dozen places, if it did not spontaneously vaporise. It was hot now; noticeably. The heat of the first few sweeps had been efficiently dissipated, but the last one had not been so easily parried, and its lethal warming energies had seeped inwards.
‘Get to the spider-room,’ Volyova shouted, momentarily throttling down the thrust to permit locomotion around the ship. ‘The insulation will enable you to survive another few strikes.’
‘No!’ Khouri was shouting now. ‘We can’t! At least here we’ve got a chance!’
‘She’s right,’ Pascale said.
‘You’ll still have one in the spider-room,’ Volyova said. ‘Better, in fact. It’s a smaller target, for one. I’m guessing the ship will direct its weapons against the shuttle in preference, or it may not even realise that the spider-room is anything but wreckage.’
‘But what about you?’
She was angry now. ‘Do you think I’m the type to indulge in heroics, Khouri? I’m coming too; with or without you. But I have to program a flight pattern into the shuttle first - unless you think you can do it.’
Khouri hesitated, as if the idea was not totally absurd. Then she unbuckled from her couch, jabbed a thumb towards Pascale and began moving, as if her life depended on it.
Which, rationally, it probably did.
Volyova did what she had promised she would do, inputting the most hair-raising evasive pattern she could imagine, one that she was not even sure she or her companions would be capable of surviving, with peak bursts exceeding fifteen gees for whole seconds. But did it really matter now? Somehow, the idea of dying while already unconscious, in the warm, muggy torpor of geeinduced blackout, was preferable to being burned alive, in vacuum, in the invisible heat of gamma-rays.
Grabbing the helmet she had worn when she boarded the shuttle, she prepared to join the others, mentally counting down until the initiation of the evasive pattern.
Khouri was halfway across to the waiting spider-room when she felt the wave of heat slap across her face, followed by the dreadful sound of the hu
ll giving up its final ghost. The illumination in the cargo bay was gone now, as the Melancholia’s energy grid collapsed under the onslaught of the attack. But the spider-room’s interior was still powered up, its implausibly plush décor visible through the observation windows.
‘Get in!’ she shouted to Pascale, and although the noise of the ship’s death-throes was now tremendous, like a concerto played on scrap metal, somehow Sylveste’s wife heard what she said and clambered into the spider-room, just as a tremendous shock wave slammed through the hull (or what remained of it), and the spider-room exploded free of the moorings in which it had been locked by Volyova’s servitors.
Now there was a terrible howl of escaping air from elsewhere in the shuttle, and suddenly Khouri felt it tug against her, resisting her forward progress. The spider-room twisted and turned, its legs thrashing wildly, randomly. She could see Pascale now, in the observation window, but there was nothing the woman could do to help; she understood the room’s controls even less comprehensively than Khouri.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 64