In one deft movement she unclipped her restraint line, slipped through the open doorway and then made the inner airlock door close again. Clavain stayed still, waiting until her face appeared in the window. She had removed her helmet and was running her fingers through the unruly mop of her hair.
‘Are you going to leave me here?’ he asked.
‘Yes. For now. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I can still space you if you do anything I don’t like.’
Clavain reached up and removed his own helmet, twisting it free. He let it drift away, tumbling across the lock like a small metal moon. ‘I’m not planning on doing anything that might annoy any of you.’
‘That’s good.’
‘But listen to me carefully. You’re in danger just being out here. We need to get out of the war zone as quickly as possible.’
‘Relax, guy,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got time to service some systems. There aren’t any zombies for light-minutes in any direction.’
‘It’s not the Demarchists you need to worry about. I was running from my own people, from the Conjoiners. They have a stealthed ship out here. Not nearby, I grant you, but it can move quickly, it has long-range missiles and I guarantee that it is looking for me.’
Antoinette said, ‘I thought you said you’d faked your death.’
He nodded. ‘I’m assuming Skade will have taken out my corvette with those same long-range missiles. She’ll have assumed I’m aboard it. But she won’t stop there. If she’s as thorough as I think she is, she’ll sweep the area with Nightshade just to make sure, searching for trace atoms.’
‘Trace atoms? You’re joking. By the time they get to where the blast happened ...’ Antoinette shook her head.
Clavain shook his in return. ‘There’ll still be a slightly enhanced density - one or two atoms per cubic metre - of the kind of elements you don’t normally find in interplanetary space. Hull isotopes, that kind of thing. Nightshade’s hull will sample and analyse the medium. The hull is covered with epoxy-coated patches that will snare anything larger than a molecule, and then there are mass spectrometers that will sniff the atomic constituency of the vacuum itself. Algorithms will process the forensic data, comparing the curves and histograms of abundance and isotope ratios against plausible scenarios for the destruction of a vessel of the corvette’s composition. The results won’t be unambiguous, for the statistical errors will be almost as large as the effects Skade’s attempting to measure. But I’ve seen it done before. The pull of the data will be in favour of there having been very little organic matter aboard the corvette.’ Clavain reached up and touched the side of his head, slowly enough that it could not be seen as threatening. ‘And then there are the isotopes in my implants. They’ll be harder to detect, a lot harder, but Skade will expect to find them if she looks hard enough. And when she doesn’t ...’
‘She’ll figure out what you did,’ Antoinette said.
Again Clavain nodded. ‘But I took all that into consideration. It will take time for Skade to make a thorough search. You can still make it back into neutral territory, but only if you start home immediately.’
‘You’re really that keen to get to the Rust Belt, Clavain?’ asked Antoinette. ‘They’ll eat you alive, whether it’s the Convention or the zombies.’
‘No one said defecting was a risk-free activity.’
‘You defected once already, right?’ Antoinette asked.
Clavain caught his drifting helmet and secured it to his belt by the helmet’s chin loop. ‘Once. It was a long time ago. Probably a bit before your time.’
‘Like four hundred years before my time?’
He scratched his beard. ‘Warm.’
‘Then it is you. You are him.’
‘Him?’
‘That Clavain. The historical one. The one everyone says has to be dead by now. The Butcher of Tharsis.’
Clavain smiled. ‘For my sins.’
EIGHTEEN
Thorn hovered above a world that was being prepared for death. They had made the trip from Nostalgia for Infinity in one of the smaller, nimbler ships that the two women had shown him in the hangar bay. The craft was a two-seat surface-to-orbit shuttle with the shape of a cobra’s head: a hoodlike wing curving smoothly into fuselage, with the cabin viewing windows positioned either side of the hull like snake eyes. The undercurve was scabbed and warted by sensors, latching pods and what he took to be various sorts of weapon. Two particle-beam muzzles jutted from the front like hinged venom fangs, and the ship’s entire skin was mosaiced with irregular scales of ceramic armour, shimmering green and black.
‘This will get us there and back?’ Thorn had asked.
‘It will,’ Vuilleumier had assured him. ‘It’s the fastest ship here, and probably the one with the smallest sensor footprint. Light armour, though, and the weapons are more for show than anything else. You want something better armoured, we’ll take it - just don’t complain if it’s slow and easily tracked.’
‘I’ll let you be the judge.’
‘This is very foolish, Thorn. There’s still time to chicken out.’
‘It isn’t a question of foolishness or otherwise, Inquisitor.’ He could not snap out of the habit of calling her that. ‘I simply won’t co-operate until I know that this threat is real. Until I can verify that for myself - with my own eyes, and not through a screen - I won’t be able to trust you.’
‘Why would we lie to you?’
‘I don’t know, but you are, I think.’ He had studied her carefully, their eyes meeting, he holding her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. ‘About something. I’m not sure what, but neither of you are being totally honest with me. Yet some of the time you are, and that’s the part I don’t fully understand.’
‘All we want to do is save the people of Resurgam.’
‘I know. I believe that part, I really do.’
They had taken the snake-headed ship, leaving Irina back aboard the larger vessel. The departure had been rapid, and though he had done his best, Thorn had not been able to sneak a look backwards. He had still not seen Nostalgia for Infinity from the outside, not even on the approach from Resurgam. Why, he wondered, would the two of them go to such lengths to hide the outside of their ship? Perhaps he was just imagining it, and he would get that view on the way back.
‘You can take the ship yourself,’ Irina had told him. ‘It doesn’t need flying. We can program a trajectory into it and let the autonomics handle any contingency. Just tell us how close you want to get to the Inhibitors.’
‘It doesn’t have to be close. A few tens of thousands of kilometres should be good enough. I’ll be able to see that arc, if it’s bright enough, and probably the tubes that are being dropped into the atmosphere. But I’m not going out there on my own. If you want me badly enough, one of you can come with me. That way I’ll know it really isn’t a trap, won’t I?’
‘I’ll go with him,’ Vuilleumier had offered.
Irina had shrugged. ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’
The trip out had been uneventful. As on the journey from Resurgam, they had spent the boring part of it asleep - not in reefersleep, but in a dreamless drug-induced coma.
Vuilleumier did not wake them until they were within half a light-second of the giant. Thorn awoke with a vague sense of irritation, a bad taste in his mouth and various aches and pains where there had been none before.
‘Well, the good news is that we’re still alive, Thorn. The Inhibitors either don’t know we’re here, or they just don’t care.’
‘Why wouldn’t they care?’
‘They must know from experience that we can’t offer them any real trouble. In a little while we’ll all be dead, so why worry about one or two of us now?’
He frowned. ‘Experience?’
‘It’s in their collective memory, Thorn. We’re not the first species they’ve done this to. The success rate must be pretty high, or else they’d revise the strategy.’
They were in free-fall. Thor
n unhitched from his seat, tugging aside the acceleration webbing, and kicked over to one of the slitlike windows. He felt a little better now. He could see the gas giant very clearly, and it did not look like a well planet.
The first things that he noticed were the three great matter streams curving in from elsewhere in the system. They twinkled palely in the light from Delta Pavonis, thin ribbons of translucent grey like great ghostly brushstrokes daubed across the sky, flat to the ecliptic and sweeping away to infinity. The flow of matter along the streams was just tangible, as one boulder or another caught the sun for an instant; it was a fine-grained creep that reminded Thorn of the sluggish currents in a river on the point of freezing. The matter was travelling at hundreds of kilometres per second, but the sheer immensity of the scene rendered even that speed glacial. The streams themselves were many, many kilometres wide. They were, he supposed, like planetary rings that had been unwound.
His gaze followed the streams to their conclusions. Near the gas giant, the smooth mathematical curves - arcs describing orbital trajectories - were curtailed by abrupt hairpins or doglegs as the streams were routed to particular moons. It was as if the artist painting the elegant swathes had been jolted at the last instant. The orientation of the moons with respect to the arriving streams was changing by the hour, of course, so the stream geometries were themselves subject to constant revision. Now and then a stream would have to be dammed back, the flow stopped while another intersected it. Or perhaps it was done with astonishingly tight timing, so that the streams passed through each other without any of the constituent masses actually colliding.
‘We don’t know how they steer them like that,’ Vuilleumier told him, her voice low and confidential. ‘There’s a lot of momentum in those streams, mass fluxes of billions of tonnes a second. Yet they change direction easily. Maybe they’ve got tiny little black holes positioned up there, so they can slingshot the streams around them. That’s what Irina thinks, anyway. Scares the hell out of me, I can tell you. Although she thinks they might also be able to turn off inertia when they need to, so they can make the streams swerve like that.’
‘That doesn’t sound much more encouraging.’
‘No, it doesn’t. But even if they can do that to inertia, or make black holes to order, they obviously can’t do it on a huge scale or we’d be dead already. They have their limitations. We have to believe that.’
The moons, a few dozen kilometres wide, were visible as tight knots of light, barbs on the ends of the infalling streams. The matter plunged into each moon through a mouthlike aperture, perpendicular to the plane of orbital motion. By rights, the unbalanced mass flux should have been forcing each moon into a new orbit. Nothing like that was happening, which suggested that, again, the normal laws of momentum conservation were being suppressed, or ignored, or put on hold until some later reckoning.
The outermost moon was laying the arc that would eventually enclose the gas giant. When Thorn had seen it from Nostalgia for Infinity it had been possible to believe that it was never destined for closure. No such assurance was possible now. The ends had continued moving outwards from the moon, the tube being extruded at a rate of a thousand kilometres every four hours. It was emerging as quickly as an express train, an avalanche of super-organised matter.
It was not magic, just industry. Thorn reminded himself of that, difficult as it was to believe it. Within the moon, mechanisms hidden beneath its icy crust were processing the incoming matter stream at demonic speed, forging the unguessable components that formed the thirteen-kilometre-wide tube. The two women had not speculated in his presence about whether the tube was solid or hollow or crammed with twinkling alien clockwork.
But it was not magic. Physical laws as Thorn understood them might be melting like toffee in the vicinity of the Inhibitor engines, but that was only because they were not the ultimate laws they appeared to be, rather mere statutes or regulations to be adhered to most of the time but broken under duress. Yet even the Inhibitors were constrained to some degree. They could work wonders, but not the impossible. They needed matter, for instance. They could work it with astonishing speed, but they could not, on the evidence gleaned so far, conjure it from nothing. It had been necessary to shatter three worlds to fuel this inferno of creativity.
And whatever they were doing, vast though it was, was necessarily slow. The arc had to be grown around the planet at a mere two hundred and eighty metres a second; it could not be created instantly. The machines were mighty, but not Godlike.
That was, Thorn decided, about all the consolation they were going to get.
He turned his attention to the two lower moons. The Inhibitors had moved them into perfectly circular orbits just above the cloud layer. Their orbits intersected periodically, but the slow, diligent cable-laying continued unabated.
This part of the process was much clearer now. Thorn could see the elegant curves of the extruded tubes emerging whip-straight from the trailing face of each moon, before flexing down towards the cloud deck. Several thousand kilometres aft of each moon, the tubes plunged into the atmosphere like syringes. The tubes were moving with orbital speed when they touched air - many kilometres per second - and they gouged livid claw marks into the atmosphere. There was a thin band of agitated rust-red immediately beneath the track of each moon which reached two or three times around the planet, each pass offset from the previous one because of the gas giant’s rotation. The two moons were etching a complex geometric pattern into the shifting clouds, a pattern that resembled an extravagant calligraphic flourish. On some level Thorn appreciated that it was beautiful, but it was also quietly sickening. Something atrocious and final was surely going to happen to the planet. The calligraphic marks were elaborate funerary rites for a dying world.
‘I take it you believe us now,’ Vuilleumier said.
‘I’m inclined to,’ Thorn said. He rapped the window. ‘I suppose this might not be glass, as it appears, but some three-dimensional screen ... but I don’t think I’ll presume that much ingenuity on your behalf. Even if I went outside in a suit, to look at it for myself, I wouldn’t be certain that the faceplate was glass either.’
‘You’re a suspicious man.’
‘I’ve learned that it helps one get by.’ Thorn returned to his seat, having seen enough for the moment. ‘All right. Next question. What’s going on down there? What are they up to?’
‘It’s not necessary to know, Thorn. The fact that something bad is going to happen is information enough.’
‘Not for me.’
‘Those machines ...’ Vuilleumier gestured at the window. ‘We know what they do, but not how they do it. They wipe out cultures, slowly and painstakingly. Sylveste brought them here - unwittingly, perhaps, although I wouldn’t take anything as read where that bastard’s concerned - and now they’ve come to do the job. That’s all you or any of us need to know. We just have to get everyone away from here as quickly as possible.’
‘If these machines are as efficient as you say, that won’t do us a great deal of good, will it?’
‘It’ll buy us time,’ she said. ‘And there’s something else. The machines are efficient, but they’re not quite as efficient as they used to be.’
‘You told me they were self-replicating machines. Why would they become less efficient? If anything they should keep getting cleverer and faster as they learn more and more.’
‘Whoever made them didn’t want them to get too clever. The Inhibitors created the machines to wipe out emergent intelligence. It wouldn’t have made much sense if the machines filled the niche they were supposed to be keeping empty.’
‘I suppose not ...’ Thorn was not going to let it lie that easily. ‘There’s more you have to tell me, I think. But in the meantime I want to get closer.’
‘How much closer?’ she asked guardedly.
‘This ship’s streamlined. It can take atmosphere, I think.’
‘That wasn’t in the agreement.’
‘So sue me.�
�� He grinned. ‘I’m naturally inquisitive, just like you.’
Scorpio came to cold, clammy consciousness, shivering uncontrollably. He pawed at himself, peeling a glistening layer of fatty gel from his naked skin. It came away in revolting semitranslucent scabs, slurping as it detached from the underlying flesh. He was careful with the area around the burn scar on his right shoulder, fingering its perimeter with tentative fascination. There was no inch of the burn that he did not know intimately, but in touching it, tracing the wrinkled topology of its shoreline where smooth pig flesh changed to something with the leathery texture of cured meat, he was reminded of the duty that was his and his alone, the duty that he had set himself since escaping from Quail. He must never forget Quail, and nor must he forget that - as altered as the man had been - Quail was fully human in the genetic sense, and that it was humans who had to bear the brunt of Scorpio’s retribution.
There was no pain now, not even from the burn, but there was discomfort and disorientation. His ears roared continually, as if he had his head shoved up a ventilation duct. His vision was blurred, revealing little more than vague amorphic shapes. Scorpio reached up and peeled more of the transparent gel from his face. He blinked. Things were clearer now, but the roaring remained. He looked around, still shivering and cold, but alert enough to take note of where he was and what was happening to him.
He had awakened inside one half of what appeared to be a cracked metal egg, curled in an unnatural foetal position with his lower half still immersed in the revolting mucous gel. Plastic pipes and connectors lay around him. His throat and nasal passages were sore, as if the pipes had recently been shoved into him. They did not appear to have been removed with the utmost care. The other half of the metal egg lay just to one side, as if the two halves had only recently been disunited. Beyond it, and all around, was the instantly identifiable interior of a spacecraft: all polished blue metal and curved, perforated struts that reminded him of ribs. The roar in his ears was the sound of thrust. The ship was travelling somewhere, and the fact that he could hear the motors told him that the ship was probably a small one, not large enough for force-cradled engines. A shuttle, then, or something similar. Definitely in-system.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 178