The overseer was not only slow and distributed. It was also temporary, permitted to achieve only fleeting consciousness. Even as its sense of self had come into being it had known with grim fatality that it would die once its duties were accomplished. But it felt no sense of bitterness at the inevitability of this fate, even after it had sifted through archived memories of its previous apparitions, memories laid down during other cleansings. It was simply the way things had to be. Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy.
It found itself remembering some of the earlier cleansings. Of course, it had not really been the same overseer that had masterminded those extinction episodes. When Inhibitor swarms met, which was rarely, they traded knowledge of recent kills and outbreaks, methods and anecdotes. Lately, those meetings had become more rare, which was why there had been only one significant addition to the library of starcide techniques in the last five hundred million years. Swarms, isolated from each other for so long, reacted cautiously when they met. There were even rumours of different Inhibitor factions clashing over extinction rights.
Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence - the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part - was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns - the three billion years - that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids.
The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings.
No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be.
The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated.
Messy. But that, as the overseer reflected, was ‘life’.
The Inquisitor looked out across rain-soaked Cuvier. Her own reflection hovered beyond the window, a spectral figure stalking the city.
‘Will you be all right with this one, ma’am?’ the guard who had brought him asked.
‘I’ll cope,’ she said, not yet turning around. ‘If I can’t, you’re only a room away. Undo his cuffs and then leave us alone.’
‘Are you certain, ma’am?’
‘Undo his cuffs.’
The guard wrenched the plastic restraints apart. Thorn stretched his arms and touched his face nervously, like an artist checking paint that might not have dried.
‘You can go now,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘Ma’am,’ the guard replied, closing the door after him.
There was a seat waiting for Thorn. He collapsed into it. Khouri continued to look out of the window, her hands clasped behind her back. The rain drooled in great curtains from the overhang above the window. The night sky was a featureless haze somewhere between red and black. There were no stars tonight, no troubling omens in the sky.
‘Did they hurt you?’ she asked.
He remembered to keep in character. ‘What do you think, Vuilleumier? That I did this to myself because I like the sight of blood?’
‘I know who you are.’
‘So do I - I’m Renzo. Congratulations.’
‘You’re Thorn. The one they’ve been looking for.’ Her voice was raised a little bit louder than normal. ‘You’re very lucky, you know.’
‘I am?’
‘If Counter-Terrorism had found you, you’d be in a morgue by now. Maybe several morgues. Luckily the police who arrested you had no idea who they were dealing with. I doubt they’d have believed me if I’d told them, quite frankly. Thorn’s like the Triumvir to them, a figure of myth and revulsion. I think they were expecting a giant among men, someone who could pull them apart with his bare hands. But you’re just a normal-looking man who could walk unnoticed down any street in Cuvier.’
Thorn rummaged around in his mouth with the tip of one finger. ‘I’d apologise for being such a disappointment if I was Thorn.’
She turned around and walked towards him. Her bearing, her expression, even the aura she radiated, was not of Khouri. Thorn experienced a dreadful moment of doubt, the thought flashing through his mind that perhaps everything that had happened since his last meeting here had been a fantasy, that there was no Khouri at all.
But Ana Khouri was real. She had told him her secrets, not just concerning her identity and the identity of the Triumvir, but the hurting secrets that went deeper, those that concerned her husband and the way they had been cruelly separated. He never doubted for one instant that she was still terribly in love with the man. At the same time he desperately wanted to break her away from her own past, to make her see that she had to accept what had happened and move on. He felt bad about it because he knew that there was a streak of self-justification in what he wanted to do, that it was not all about - or even mainly about - helping Khouri. He also wanted to make love to her. He despised himself for it, but the urge was still there.
‘Can you stand?’ she asked.
‘I walked in here.’
‘Come with me, then. Do not attempt anything, Thorn. It will be very bad for you if you do.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘There’s a matter we need to discuss in private.’
‘Here’s fine by me,’ he said.
‘Would you like me to turn you over to Counter-Terrorism, Thorn? It’s very easily arranged. I’m sure they’d be delighted to see you.’
She took him into the room he remembered from his first visit, with the walls covered in shelves loaded with bulging paperwork. Khouri shut the door behind her - it sealed tightly and hermetically - and then removed a slim silver cylinder the size of a cigar from a desk drawer. She held it aloft and slowly turned around in the centre of the room, while tiny lights buried in the cigar flicked from red to green.
‘We’re safe,’ she said, after the lights had remained green for three or four minutes. ‘I’ve had to take extra precautions lately. They got a bug in here when I was up on the starship.’
Thorn said, ‘Did they learn much?’
‘No. It was a crude device and by the time I got back it was already faulty. But they’ve made another attempt since, a bit more sophisticated. I can’t take any chances, Thorn.’
‘Who is it? Another branch of government?’
‘Perhaps. Could be this one, even. I promised them the Triumvir’s head on a plate and I haven’t delivered. Someone’s getting suspicious. ’
‘You’ve got me.’
‘Yes, so I suppose there are some consolat
ions. Oh, shit.’ It was as if she had only noticed him properly then. ‘Look at what they did to you, Thorn. I’m so sorry you had to go through this.’ From another drawer she produced a small medical kit. Khouri tipped disinfectant into a wad of cotton wool and jammed it against Thorn’s split eyebrow.
‘That hurts,’ Thorn said.
Her face was very close to his. He could see every pore, and because she was so close he could look into her eyes without feeling that he was staring.
‘It will. Did they really rough you up badly?’
‘Nothing your friends downstairs haven’t done to me before. I’ll live, I think.’ He winced. ‘They were pretty ruthless.’
‘They weren’t given any special orders, only the usual tip-off. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it had to be. If there’s a single detail about your arrest that looks stage-managed we’re finished.’
‘Do you mind if I sit down?’
She helped him to a seat. ‘I’m sorry other people had to get hurt, too.’
Thorn remembered the police piling into the woman with bad teeth. ‘Can you make sure they all get out all right?’
‘No one will be detained. That’s part of the plan.’
‘I mean it. Those people don’t deserve to suffer just because there had to be witnesses, Ana.’
She applied more disinfectant. ‘They’ll suffer a hell of a lot more if this doesn’t work, Thorn. No one will set foot on those shuttles unless they trust you to lead them. A little pain now is worth it if it means not dying later.’ As if to emphasise her point she pressed the wad against his brow, Thorn groaning at the needlelike discomfort.
‘That’s a cold way of looking at things,’ he said. ‘Makes me think you spent more time with those Ultras than you told me.’
‘I’m not an Ultra, Thorn. I used them. They used me. That doesn’t make us the same.’ She closed up the medical kit and slammed it back into the desk. ‘Try to keep that in mind, will you?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that this whole business is so Goddamned brutal. We’re treating the people of this planet like sheep, herding them to where we know is best for them. Not trusting them to make their own minds up.’
‘They haven’t got time to make their minds up, that’s the problem. I’d love to do this democratically, I really would. I’d like nothing better than a clean conscience. But it ain’t going to happen that way. If the people know what’s going to happen to them - that what they’ve got in store, other than remaining on this doomed fuckhole of a planet, is a trip to a starship which just happens to have been consumed and transformed by the plague-infected body of its former captain, who incidentally happens to be a totally deranged murderer - do you think there’s going to be a stampede for those shuttles? Throw in the fact that rolling out the red carpet when they get there will be Triumvir Ilia Volyova, Resurgam’s number-one hate figure, and I think a lot of people will say “thanks, but no thanks”, don’t you?’
Thorn said, ‘At least they’d have made their own minds up.’
‘Yeah. A lot of consolation that’ll be when we watch them getting incinerated. Sorry, Thorn, but I’ll take the bitch option now and worry about ethics later, when we’ve saved a few lives.’
‘You won’t save everyone even if your plan works.’
‘I know. We could, but we won’t. It’s inevitable. There are two hundred thousand people out there. If we started now, we could get all of them off this planet in six months, although a year is more likely given all the variables. But even that might not be enough time. I think I’ll have to consider this operation a success if we save only half of them. Maybe fewer than that. I don’t know.’ She rubbed her face, suddenly looking very much older and wearier than she had before. ‘I’m trying not to think how badly this might all go.’
The black telephone on her desk rang. Khouri let it ring for a few seconds, one eye on the silver cylinder. The lights stayed green. She motioned to Thorn to stay quiet and then picked up the heavy black handset, holding it against the side of her head.
‘Vuilleumier. I hope this is important. I’m interviewing a suspect in the Thorn inquiry.’
The voice on the other end of the phone spoke back to her. Khouri let out a sigh and then closed her eyes. The voice continued talking. Thorn could hear none of the actual words, but enough of the voice’s tone reached him for a certain rising desperation to become apparent. Someone sounded as if they were trying to explain something that had gone awfully wrong. The voice reached a crescendo and then fell silent.
‘I want the names of those involved,’ Khouri said, and then placed the handset back on to its cradle.
She looked at Thorn. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘They killed someone, when the police broke up the meeting. She died a few minutes ago. A woman . . .’
He stopped her. ‘I know which one you mean.’
Khouri said nothing. The silence filled the room, amplified and trapped by the masses of paperwork surrounding them; lives annotated and documented in numbing precision, all for the purposes of suppression.
‘Did you know her name?’ Khouri asked.
‘No. She was just a follower. Just someone who wanted a way to leave Resurgam.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Khouri reached across the desk and took his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I mean it, Thorn. I didn’t want it to begin this way.’
Despite himself he laughed hollowly. ‘Well, she got it, didn’t she? What she wanted. A way off this planet. She was the first.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Armoured in black, Skade strode through the ship that was now fully hers. For the time being they were safe, having slipped undetected through the last shell of Demarchist perimeter defences. Now there was nothing between Nightshade and its destination except empty light-years.
Skade brushed her steel fingers against the corridor plating, loving the sleek conjunction of artificial things. For a time the ship had carried Clavain’s stench of ownership, and even after he had defected there had been Remontoire to contend with, Clavain’s sympathiser and ally, but now they were both gone, and she could rightfully consider Nightshade her own. She could, if she were minded, change the name to one of her own choosing, or perhaps discard the very idea of naming the ship at all, so resolutely against the grain of Conjoiner thinking. But Skade decided that there was a perverse pleasure to be had in keeping the old name. There would be enjoyment in turning Clavain’s prized weapon against himself, and that enjoyment would be all the sweeter if the weapon still carried the name he had bestowed upon it. It would be a final humiliation, rich reward for all that he had done to her.
Yet, for all that she despised what he had done, she could not deny that she was adjusting to her new state of body in a way that might have alarmed her weeks earlier. Her armour was becoming her. She admired her form in the gleam of bulkheads and portals. The initial clumsiness was gone now, and in the privacy of her quarters she spent long hours amusing herself with astonishing tricks of strength, dexterity and prestidigitation. The armour was learning to anticipate her movements, freeing itself from any need to wait for signals to crawl up and down her spine. Skade played lightning-fast one-handed fugues on a holoclavier, her gauntleted fingers becoming a blur of metal as quick and lethal as threshing machinery. Toccata in D, by someone called Bach, collapsed under her mastery. It became a rapid blast of sound like Gatling-gun fire, requiring neural post-processing to separate it into anything resembling ‘music’.
It was all a distraction, of course. Skade might have slipped through the Demarchists’ final line of defences, but in the last three days she had become aware that her difficulties were not entirely at an end. There was something following her, coming out of the Yellowstone system on a very similar trajectory.
It was time, Skade decided, to share this news with Felka.
Nightshade was silent. Skade’s footsteps were all she heard as she made her way down to the sleep bay. They rang hard and regular as hammers i
n a foundry. The ship was accelerating at two gees, the inertia-suppressing machinery running smooth and quiet, but walking for Skade was effortless.
Skade had frozen Felka shortly after news reached Skade of her most recent failure. At that point it had become clear, following scrutiny of news items around Yellowstone, that Clavain had eluded her again; that Remontoire and the pig had not succeeded in capturing him but had themselves fallen victim to local bandits. It would have been attractive at that point to assume that Clavain himself was dead, but she had made that mistake before and was not about to fall into the same error again. That was precisely why she had kept Felka back, as leverage to be used in any future negotiations with Clavain. She knew what he thought about Felka.
It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter.
Skade had intended to return to the Mother Nest on completion of the mission, but the failure to kill Clavain forced her to reconsider. Nightshade was capable of continuing into interstellar space, and any minor technical issues could be dealt with on the way to Delta Pavonis. The Master of Works did not need her direct supervision to finish building the evacuation fleet either. Once the fleet was flight-ready and equipped with inertia-suppressing machinery, part of it would follow Skade towards the Resurgam system, while the rest would set off in a different direction, loaded with sleeping evacuees. A single crustbuster warhead would finish off the Mother Nest.
Skade would attempt to recover the weapons. If she failed on her first attempt, she would have only to wait for her backup fleet to arrive. Those were much larger starships and they could carry larger armaments than Nightshade, up to heavy relativistic railguns. Once she had obtained possession of the lost weapons, she would rendezvous with the rest of the evac fleet in a different system, in the opposite half of the sky from Delta Pavonis, as far away from the Inhibitor encroachment as they could get.
Then they would set off into even deeper space, many dozens, perhaps even hundreds of light-years into the galactic plane. It was time to say goodbye to local solar space. None of them were very likely to see it again.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 195